Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “I knew I was crossing a line,” Barbara would later admit of the trip to Monaco. “What was I letting myself in for? Was I about to be seduced by one of the world’s greatest romantics? Would it be something to fold in my memory, a story to lift out and tell my grandchildren one day? Could I live with that?”

  Indeed, once she got to Monaco, she decided that, yes, she could live with it just fine.

  “Lucky girl, I thought to myself,” Barbara recalled of her first moments in Monaco. “Remember this moment,” she told herself as she gazed out at the view from Frank’s penthouse in his suite at the Hotel de Paris. “After toasting each other, we moved closer, then he enfolded me in the gentlest embrace,” she remembered. “A few hours later, we watched as the dawn crept through the windows and clung to each other ever tighter. Towards the end of an uneventful next day of pretending nothing had happened, I met a group of friends and stepped into one of two waiting cars that were taking us to a dinner. Before we knew it, we were on board Frank’s G2 Gulfstream jet, headed for Athens. ‘I fancy Greek food tonight,’ he explained, laughing.”

  “She was perfect for Frank,” Dinah Shore said of Barbara in an interview eighteen months before her death in February 1994. “He didn’t want a woman in show business, and she wasn’t. She’s the type of woman who would do anything to support her husband’s interests. That’s what I’ve always admired about her. She’s what I call a ‘team player.’ “

  Barbara: Trying to Fit In

  Barbara was a woman of great charisma and few could deny the power of her personality. Whatever Frank wanted to do, she was ready for it. She would go out dancing every night if she had to; she would stay up until the early morning hours if need be; she would drink more than she usually did if he asked her to do so. In other words, she could and would keep up with Sinatra.

  When she separated from Zeppo, she didn’t have a place to live. She loved a small house in the desert owned by Eden Marx, Groucho’s third wife, and currently for sale. She mentioned to Frank that she wasn’t sure she could afford it. The next day, he bought it for her, all cash, and put her name on the deed of sale. Some observers felt she had manipulated Frank just by mentioning to him that she couldn’t afford it, but it didn’t matter to her what others thought. More grateful to Frank with each passing day, she happily put up with all of the stares and whispers.

  Barbara knew that Dolly didn’t like her, but Dolly didn’t like Jilly Rizzo either—she called him “Fuck Face”—and yet Rizzo was still around, so she had to wonder how influential Dolly really was. However, taking Mia’s lead, she thought it best to win over the other women in Frank’s life: Nancy Sr., Nancy Jr., and Tina. Here, though, she would have her work cut out for her.

  The difference between Mia and Barbara was obvious. In the Sinatras’ eyes, Mia seemed to have no hidden agenda other than a quest for a father figure. They knew that, a hippie at heart, she had little interest in material possessions and wasn’t after Frank’s money. Even after the divorce, the daughters continued their friendship with her. However, something wasn’t quite kosher with Barbara. The Sinatras had heard from multiple sources that the twice-married beauty had chosen her boyfriends and husbands based at least in part on their finances, information that immediately aroused their suspicions. When Barbara invited them to her home for cocktails so that she could break the ice, they couldn’t help but be distrustful. They knew that Frank had purchased the home for her, and since she was still married to Zeppo, none of it felt right to them. They didn’t really know Barbara yet, but they’d been around Frank and his women for most of their lives; they couldn’t help but be suspicious of Barbara.

  Barbara sued Zeppo for divorce on December 27, 1972, ending their thirteen-year marriage, shortly before she accompanied Frank to the Nixon presidential inaugural.

  Dating Frank would not be easy, as Barbara would soon learn—especially when it came to dining. For instance, at a dinner party at his home, she was served a piece of undercooked veal. Because she couldn’t eat it, she politely sent it back to the kitchen for further cooking. Apparently the chef took umbrage and started rattling pots and pans in annoyance. Frank sprang up and ran into the kitchen. “You have about five seconds to get your fat ass out of my house,” he shouted at the cook. “Five, four, three, two. . .” The chef took off as fast as his feet could carry him. Barbara was a little startled, but not as much as she would be a few days later at Matteo’s restaurant.

  Frank liked his pasta al dente; everyone knew it, especially the staffs of every Italian restaurant he frequented. However, one night at Matteo’s in Los Angeles, the pasta was served too soggy. Frank jumped up and ran into the kitchen. “Where the hell are all the Italians?” he asked as he took one look around and realized the staff was entirely of Filipino descent. He couldn’t believe it, especially since the owner, Matty Jordan, was a childhood friend of his from Hoboken. “You must be kidding!” he exclaimed. He hurried back to the table. Once there, he picked up the plate of pasta and threw it against the wall, spaghetti and tomato sauce flying everywhere. “Let’s go,” he ordered Barbara. Alarmed, she quickly gathered her things. But just as they were walking out the door, Frank said, “Wait! Hold on!” He then went back to the wall and with his index finger carefully wrote out one word with the tomato sauce: picasso.

  The next day, Matty Jordan put a frame around Frank’s artwork, and it stayed there for years.

  Cheshire Contretemps

  Barbara Marx would get another taste of Frank Sinatra’s violent temper on January 19, 1973. That was the date the two attended a party hosted by Louise Gore, the Republican national committee-woman from Maryland, at the Fairfax Hotel in Washington. One reporter covering the event, Maxine Cheshire (a society columnist for the Washington Post), had been critical of the Sinatra-Agnew relationship in the past. A few months earlier, she had confronted Frank at an Agnew state dinner in Washington and asked him point-blank, “Mr. Sinatra, do you think your alleged association with the Mafia will prove to be the same embarrassment to Vice President Agnew that it was to the Kennedy administration?”

  Sinatra tried to act unfazed. “No,” he said. “I don’t worry about things like that.” He was seething inside, though, irate over her temerity.

  In fact, Maxine Cheshire couldn’t get her mind off of what had happened between Frank and the Kennedys, often going back to the subject in her column. She seemed obsessed with the story. All of her reporting suggested that she believed the Kennedys had good reason to end their relationship with Frank due to his mob ties, and that Nixon and Agnew would be best advised to follow suit.

  As Frank and Barbara were entering the Fairfax Hotel, Cheshire confronted Frank with more questions. When he was mum, she tried Barbara. “You are still married to Zeppo, aren’t you Mrs. Marx?” she asked. Barbara immediately looked embarrassed. She wasn’t used to such scrutiny, not yet, anyway. That did it. Frank instantly became furious and confrontational.

  “You know what?” Frank told Maxine angrily. “You’re nothing but a two-dollar . . .” And then he used a word that couldn’t be repeated in mixed company, ever. Not only did he call Cheshire the “c” word, he actually spelled it out for her! “You know what that means, don’t you, Maxine?” he continued. “You’ve been laying down for two dollars all your life.” Pulling a couple of bucks from his pocket, he stuffed them into a plastic cup of ginger ale that Cheshire happened to be holding. “Now get away from me, you scum,” he told her. “Go home and take a bath. Me? I’m getting out of here to rid myself of the stench that is Miss Cheshire.”

  Maxine Cheshire was so stunned and insulted, she burst into tears.

  Shock waves from Frank’s outburst reverberated for weeks; news reports about the incident astonished even his most devoted fans. For days later, Nixon and Agnew were both unsettled about it, as, of course, was Maxine. “If he had attacked me as a reporter, I would have taken it,” she noted. “But he attacked me as a woman.” She contemplated suing him, but realized tha
t verbal abuse wasn’t grounds for litigation.

  Before a nightclub appearance soon after that incident, Frank’s friend Peter Pitchess—former sheriff of Los Angeles County—took him to task for the Cheshire incident. He told Frank that he should have demonstrated more restraint and that he should apologize for his actions. Frank mulled it over and agreed. “You’re right,” he said. “I should apologize.” That night, he went onstage, and during a break between songs, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have an apology to make.” Sinatra making an apology? The room fell silent. “I called Maxine Cheshire a two-dollar whore,” he said thoughtfully. “I was wrong and I apologize.” Then, after a beat: “She’s really just a one-dollar whore.”

  One would think that Barbara, who didn’t know Frank that well yet, though she was learning about him quickly, would have gone running in the other direction rather than pursue a relationship with him. However, this was not the case. In fact, she was proud of what he’d done. “As he walked me away from Maxine,” Barbara would later recall, “I thought, Oh my God! But I had to admit there was also something exciting about it. I’d never felt quite so defended in my life. Henry Kissinger called the next day and said, ‘Frank, you overpaid Cheshire.’ “

  Eileen Faith was a friend of Barbara Marx’s at this time. The two met when she was married to Zeppo; Faith lived in Los Angeles. “Barbara was a lot like Frank in the sense that she would never hesitate telling someone what she thought. She always believed that people should stick up for themselves. She could be sweet as pie, but when pushed she would turn on you with such anger that you’d be scared. She told me that Cheshire had been goading her, trying to embarrass her, asking questions about her relationship with Frank and inquiring, ‘You are still married, aren’t you?’ So Barbara was happy that Frank came to her defense. Actually, I think that the Cheshire incident brought them closer together.”

  By April 1973, with the controversy over Cheshire passing, Frank performed at a White House dinner for Giulio Andreotti, prime minister of Italy. It was a wide-ranging, heartfelt concert during which he sang ten songs, including “You Make Me Feel So Young” and “The House I Live In.” The question on most people’s lips was: What kind of retirement is this? After that wonderful show, Nixon went up to Sinatra and said, “What are you retired for? You really should sing.” Frank had to agree. He really did want to begin touring again. Barbara Marx later felt one of the reasons he wanted to go back on the road was so that she could go with him. This way, she reasoned, he would be able to get her out of Palm Springs for about a year, and away from Zeppo. “Frank would almost certainly have made a comeback sooner or later,” she recounted, “but quietly and thoughtfully, my romantic lover had come up with a plan to whisk us away even earlier.” The idea that Frank would plan a world tour just to keep Barbara away from Zeppo seems like a leap, in retrospect. But certainly stranger things had happened in his world.

  In June 1973, Frank Sinatra was back in the recording studio with producer-arranger Don Costa and arranger Gordon Jenkins. In four sessions, he recorded eleven songs, including the lovely “You Will Be My Music” (which he would later tell Barbara was “our story, baby,” since she was with him in the studio when he cut it) and the hopeful “Let Me Try Again,” one of Sinatra’s most enduring ballads and in many ways an appropriate title for his “comeback album,” Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back.

  Both the public and music critics joyfully welcomed Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. Frank had been missed. After all, there was no one like him. The album revealed him still at full power as an artist and a man of impeccable musical taste. This was a good time in his life. His career was on track—and his personal life seemed to have new meaning now that Barbara Marx was in his world.

  Spiro, Barbara, and the Aussies

  While Frank was beginning to resume his career, one of his close friends was preparing to end his. On October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned, pleading nolo contendere to one count of income tax evasion. With the Watergate investigations occurring at the same time, the Nixon-Agnew team was clearly in trouble. Agnew had also been charged with taking cash kickbacks from a Maryland contractor, bribery, and extortion. Frank did what he could to help, even dispatching Mickey Rudin to look into the Agnew matter. In the end, Sinatra—who had felt all along that Agnew should fight back—was disappointed when he resigned.

  “As a citizen who loves America and as a good friend of Mr. Agnew’s, this is indeed a sad day,” he said. “Certainly I offer whatever sympathy and support my friend may need. It takes great courage to pursue the route he has chosen.”

  In the past, Sinatra’s White House friends had many high-level meetings to determine whether it was in their best interest to be associated with a man as controversial as Frank. Now the tables were turned. Sinatra, Mickey Rudin, and the rest of his staff were wondering how Agnew’s troubles might affect Sinatra’s comeback plans. Frank was adamant that he would not desert Agnew, however, even going so far as paying the $30,000 penalty on his tax debt and attempting to secure a publishing deal for his memoirs for $500,000 (a deal he was not able to make). He never abandoned Spiro Agnew and remained his friend long after the former vice president fell from grace.

  Frank, now fifty-eight, started the new year back onstage at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on January 25, 1974. He had vowed never to appear there again after Sanford Waterman pulled a gun on him in 1970. However, Waterman had been indicted for racketeering and Frank felt he could now go back to Caesars for one of his “comeback” performances.

  Also in January, Tina, now twenty-five, married producer and writer Wes Farrell—also twenty-five—who had thus far amassed a long list of pop hits, including, most recently, many of the Partridge Family’s chartbusters. It was his second marriage and Tina’s first. Frank walked Tina down the aisle. By this time, Nancy had married the very successful dancer and choreographer Hugh Lambert. Four months after Tina’s marriage, Nancy gave birth to her first child with Lambert, Angela Jennifer—known to all as A.J. Frank Jr. was still single and working as a singer and recording artist.

  By this time, Frank and Barbara were living together in his Palm Springs estate. Wanting to be with her, Frank asked her to accompany him on a tour of the Far East in July 1974.

  Frank’s time in Asia with Barbara was serene and romantic. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her, no gift he wouldn’t buy for her. A successful five-country tour through Europe then followed, also a memorable time. Of course, being wined and dined everywhere she went was great fun for Barbara, and Frank made sure she was treated like royalty every day. In return, she made him very happy and everyone on his crew knew it. He was in a good mood almost every day. The two would take day trips together, enjoy romantic candlelit meals, and spend as much free time together as possible between shows and traveling in his private jet.

  In Frank’s eyes, Barbara could do no wrong, and she felt the same way about him—even in Australia when Frank got tired of the pushy press and insulted them from the stage one night, calling the men “a bunch of fags” and the women “broads and buck-and-a-half hookers.” A few Aussie reporters were even roughed up by Frank’s overzealous “Dago Secret Service.” It reminded some of the last time Frank had been in Australia, when he was being stalked by an aggressive fan. When the stalker found his way into Frank’s suite, Jilly beat him over the head with a large standing metal ashtray. “Don’t even ax me about the crazy bums in dat country,” Jilly later said.

  Barbara took no issue with Frank’s behavior in Australia; as usual, she supported him unequivocally. Actually, she found getting caught in the maelstrom that was Frank’s day-to-day thrilling and enlivening. “I loved every minute of it,” she would say. “Each day was a new adventure . . . I had to pinch myself every time I looked across the bed to see his tousled head on the pillow next to mine.”

  When a press agent in Sydney insisted that Sinatra appear at a press conference and explain himself, it was Barbara who reminded him that he didn�
�t have to do anything he didn’t want to do—not that he needed reminding. The concept of “media relations” was still not one to be embraced by him. He said a lot, but never quite the right thing at the right time. The next day, one of the headlines read “Ol Big Mouth Is Back.”

  After Frank refused to apologize for his remarks about the media, the anger directed at him spread like a cancer, until soon the Stagehands Union refused to work for him and the Waiters Union wouldn’t serve him and his crew food at his hotel. Then Transport Union workers wouldn’t refuel his Gulfstream jet so that he could leave the country. Everyone wanted an apology from one of the few celebrities on the planet who pretty much never apologized for anything. “Well, good luck with that, I thought,” Barbara recalled. Said Don Rickles back in the States, “Frank called me. He just declared war on Australia.”

  Eventually, a joint statement was issued from Sinatra and the Australian labor unions that placated everyone who had been offended by the remarks—with no direct apology from the man himself—just so that Frank and Barbara could get out of the country. Frank also agreed to tape a TV special as part of the deal. “Needless to say, we left them flapping in our exhaust fumes,” Barbara concluded.

  “They finally let Frank out of the country,” Bob Hope joked, “right after the head of the union down there woke up one morning and saw a kangaroo’s head on the next pillow.”14

  Finding Her Way

  The months passed. On October 13, 1974, Frank’s comeback concert at Madison Square Garden was televised to terrific reviews. The Garden concert—staged in a boxing ring and hosted by sportscaster Howard Cosell—was billed as “The Main Event.” It would also be broadcast around the world, followed by an album of the same name. Frank had been nervous about the venture—he never liked doing television specials—and leaned on Barbara for emotional support. By now, she had a way of calming him like no one else in his life. But this did not mean that everything was rosy all the time for the two of them; this was Frank Sinatra’s life, after all. He could be crude, he could be mean . . . and Barbara could find herself his target.