Years later, D’Orazio recalled, “I almost shit my pants. He was so mad at me. I thought he was going to reach out and strangle me.”
“Fine, then. Sue her, Mickey,” Frank said, changing the subject. “Sue her. That’s the only answer.”
Mickey wasn’t sure of the wisdom of a lawsuit. Perhaps he remembered the last time he and Frank brought a lawsuit against a biographer. It had made Frank look a bit ridiculous when in 1976 he litigated against New York columnist Earl Wilson and his publisher, Macmillan, for a million dollars over Wilson’s adoring book Sinatra. The charge was not libel or slander. Frank had came up with another complaint: “The book is boring and uninteresting,” he charged in the suit.
Sinatra also claimed that Wilson’s book was unfair competition to the book he himself might one day write. Moreover, he charged that some of what Wilson wrote wasn’t true. However, as to those parts he claimed were false, he said that if it was ever proved at trial that they were true, it would only be because he had given Wilson the information, and in that case, the statements were protected by “a common-law copyright” because Sinatra hadn’t wanted the statements to be published when he made them to Wilson. Certainly this was one of the more unusual lawsuits ever brought against a writer by a public figure.
Ultimately it was decided that Mickey Rudin would file a $2 million lawsuit against Kitty Kelley and her publisher, Bantam, prior to publication of the book in the hope of preventing it from going forward. To justify the action, Sinatra would allege that he owned his own story and, moreover, that Kelley was misrepresenting herself as Sinatra’s “official biographer.” (She would claim that she did no such thing.)
The action was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on September 21, 1983. Writers’ groups, such as the National Writers Union, came to Kelley’s defense, fearing that if Sinatra prevailed, the result would have a chilling effect on freedom of the press. Sinatra would drop the lawsuit in 1984.
Frank and Barbara Separate
The year 1984 would continue in the same vein of accomplishment for Frank Sinatra—concerts, benefits, award shows, telethons, trips abroad, and more. In April and May he recorded the L.A. Is My Lady album, produced by Quincy Jones. It was an album Frank was never fond of because he felt they didn’t spend enough time choosing material for it. In the end, the public would buy it because it was a Sinatra album, but not because it was a very good one. At the end of the year Frank and Barbara had dinner at the White House with the Reagans.
By the beginning of 1985, Frank and Barbara seemed to outsiders like a couple who might want to reconsider their matrimonial bond, because they’d begun to have serious conflicts. Many of Sinatra’s associates remember one particularly unpleasant scene at Bally’s in Las Vegas. Frank, Jilly, and several others were drinking, gambling, and losing money when Barbara spotted them. Frank was crouched over the craps table with a cigarette hanging from his lips. He removed it for a moment as he downed the last few drops of his vodka and soda.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink?” Barbara asked as she approached.
Frank rolled his eyes in her direction. “Listen, I’m working hard. Gimme a break. I’m relaxing.”
“But you’re losing all of the money you’re earning while working here,” she said, trying to reason with him. “Between what you lose and what you give away, you’ll never be able to stop working.”
Indeed, an ongoing quarrel between the Sinatras had to do with Frank’s working hard to maintain a certain lifestyle but then spending money as quickly as he made it. Another point of contention was that Frank habitually gave Nancy, Tina, and Frank Jr. thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts. Barbara said that she felt they were old enough to fend for themselves and should not accept such kinds of gifts from their father. The Sinatras, however, felt that she was really just trying to control their finances, as well as their father’s. “Dad used to shower us with gifts all the time, and that stopped,” recalled Nancy Sinatra. “All of his gifting was now to his new wife. This sounds selfish. It wasn’t the gifts; it was what they meant. It wasn’t the lack of presents; it was the lack of his presence. When you tend to show love by giving presents and they stop, well, what is there to think?”
In fact, since marrying her Frank had purchased so much expensive jewelry for Barbara—gold chains, bracelets, diamond earrings, necklaces—that they filled a steel strongbox two feet long, a foot wide, and eight inches deep. “One day she asked me and the housekeeper to carry the box out of the house so she could put her prized possessions in a safe-deposit box,” said Bill Stapely, his butler at this time. “We were both grunting and groaning under the strain. That thing weighed a ton.”
“And why do you encourage this behavior?” Barbara demanded to know of Jilly. Rizzo was a big, intimidating presence, but Barbara was never cowed by him. “You should know better,” she scolded him. “You’re supposed to be his friend!”
“Jilly is my friend,” Frank shouted at his wife. Jilly didn’t say a word. The throng that had gathered as the result of the commotion fell silent.
“You know what? You’re outta here,” Frank finally announced, glaring at Barbara. “Pack your bags, every one of ’em. I want you out of the suite before I go back up there. We’re finished, Barbara. It’s ova. You hear me. Ova!” Aside from his heaving chest, Frank stood motionless, his eyes darkened with rage. “Damn it!” he exclaimed as he raised both fists. “I want to punch you so bad right now, you don’t know how bad.”
Barbara wouldn’t be browbeaten by him. “Oh yeah?” she asked, standing up to him. Her blue eyes were cold as steel. “Give it your best shot, then, Frank,” she said, jutting out her chin at him. “Go ahead, hit me. Hit me.”
“And what would you do if I did?” he asked her angrily. “’Cause I could knock you right across the room right now, Barbara. I swear to Christ. Right across the room!”
“What would I do?” she repeated his question. “I’d leave you and you’d never see me again, that’s what I would do. So, go ahead, do it, Frank. I dare you!”
Frank’s hands dropped to his side.
Barbara gathered herself and moved away from the crowd and toward the elevators. She knew it was impossible to deal with Frank on any level of reason when they were both so worked up. Meanwhile, Frank went back to his gambling as if nothing had happened. Barbara returned to their suite, packed her bags—“every one of ’em”—caught a cab to the airport, and took the Sinatra private jet back to Rancho Mirage.
“Frank came home two days later,” said Bill Stapely. “For the next two weeks, there was an icy chill between them. I never heard them say one word to each other. After two weeks of this, Barbara packed some bags and moved out of the house. After she left, Frank told me, ‘This marriage is over. I’m glad that broad is out of my life. She was driving me crazy.’ ”
Frank was done with Barbara, at least in that moment; as far as he was concerned, they were separated. Some felt that the wedge his marriage had caused between him and his family members had worn him down, and had also caused him to start acting out. Certainly he was tense, upset, and irrational, but was this anything new? When he told his daughters that he and Barbara had separated, they were—in his presence, anyway—sorry to hear about it. Privately they were very happy—or, as Tina put it, “I was as gleeful as a Munchkin after the house fell on Margaret Hamilton’s sister.”
Working against Frank, though, in the notion of ending his marriage to Barbara was the passing of time. Previously he wouldn’t have delayed ending a relationship. Ava had been his only weakness. Others, like Betty Bacall and Mia Farrow, had been quickly dispatched. But now he was seventy and much more fearful of being alone. Even though his daughters would always be there for him and he must have known as much, there had recently been so much conflict with them, he had to wonder how long it would take to repair the damage. Also, he had hurt Nancy Sr. with his annulment of their marriage. She would always be in his corner, but there was damage there, and h
e knew it. If Barbara was to also be gone, who would be left for him?
As well as feeling he could potentially be alone in his old age, the idea of a divorce battle with Barbara was less than appealing. She had already retained a divorce attorney, Arthur Crowley. He was a noted lawyer and he was tough; within a week of this fight, he’d already drawn up divorce papers for Barbara! She would likely not go quietly into the night, as had Mia before her. Mia hadn’t even asked for alimony. Frank suspected that divorcing Barbara would be a very different experience. Still, he told Mickey to start drawing up divorce papers.
There was one other factor at work: Frank really did love Barbara. In his own way, he still loved her very much and actually couldn’t imagine a life without her. At a crossroads, he asked Father Tom Rooney for his opinion. Rooney said that in his view—and of course in the view of the Church—marriage was a sacred sacrament. After all Frank had gone through to marry Barbara in the Catholic Church, the priest felt he had to fight for his union with her. It would take work, Father Rooney conceded, but it was worth it.
About a month later, Frank had changed his mind about Barbara: He now wanted to reconcile with her. She wasn’t going to make it easy on him, though. He would give her all the money in the world if she asked for it, but what she wanted was a bit more of a problem for him: She wanted an apology.
As a consequence of his many turbulent fights with Ava, Frank was loath ever to offer a real apology to a woman. “He told me that he spent so many years apologizing to Ava for this and that,” Joey D’Orazio said, “that when it ended with her he made up his mind that he would never tell another dame he was sorry. And I have to say, I never heard him apologize to anyone after Ava.”
“Frank Sinatra never apologized to anybody,” Barbara later confirmed. “Ever. Period. Not even to me. He always said, ‘There are two things I never do—yawn in front of the woman I love, and apologize.’ The latter was not in his psyche, for to apologize would be to admit that he might have been wrong. But I told him I’d only stay if he said sorry.”
“Forgiveness and reconciliation is a very important part of the gospel,” Father Tom Rooney told Frank in front of friends one night at the compound. “When a person forgives you, you are then free to forgive yourself and move on with your life. There is nothing wrong with asking for forgiveness.” But Frank just didn’t see it that way, and he wasn’t going to change his mind about it.
“Under duress, he finally admitted, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ ” Barbara would recall. “It was a half-assed apology, but it was the only one I ever got.”
“I’m a dumb guy, all right?” Frank conceded to her. “I do dumb things. That ain’t news, Barbara. That ain’t news at all.” When he kissed her tenderly, all was well again in their world.
Sick over the Kitty Kelley Book
In December 1985, Frank Sinatra turned seventy. Bob Greene said it best in a column in the Chicago Tribune when he wrote, “The fact that Frank Sinatra is celebrating his 70th birthday this week is something that will cause many people to stop and think for a moment. Frank Sinatra—70 years old. It has less to do with Sinatra than with the rest of us. If Sinatra is 70, what has happened to us?” Indeed, it would seem that as Frank faced his mortality, much of his public was forced to do the same. He had been a part of so many lives for so long, it was difficult, even painful, to watch him grow old, mostly because it served as a reminder that he was not alone.
When Kitty Kelley’s His Way biography of Sinatra was finally published in October 1986, it was much worse than Frank and the Sinatra family imagined. Indeed, Kelley held back no details of Dolly’s history. Dolly’s secrets were now out for all to know and to scrutinize.
Of course, there was much that Frank objected to in Kelley’s book. However, he would just have to accept its attendant controversies as the price of fame. The Sinatras would have their say in yet another book by Nancy (Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, with hundreds of photographs) and, later, in an authorized television miniseries produced by Tina Sinatra in 1994. Kitty Kelley’s portrayal of Dolly’s activities as “a mother who kills babies,” though, was what most upset Frank. “He was very verbal about having Kitty Kelly whacked for what she had written about his mother,” the singer Paul Anka said in 2013.
It’s questionable whether Frank actually wanted Kelley “whacked,” but in fact the entire family was crushed by her writings. It was as if a dark cloud had descended upon the entire fold when the book debuted at the number one position on the New York Times bestseller list on October 12, 1986. When Frank turned the television set on one day and saw Kelley talking about his mother’s arrest, he became so agitated that his family thought he would have to be treated at a hospital for an anxiety attack.
Bill Stapely remembered the night Frank almost spoke to Kelley on a television call-in program. “I take issue with a lot of what’s in it,” Stapely overheard Frank saying of the book to the segment producer who was screening callers for the broadcast. “But I just want to ask one simple question: Does this dopey broad have a mother? That’s all I wanna know. And if so, then how can she write that stuff about mine? That’s it. That’s the whole enchilada. That’s all I want to know.”
The producer, who must have been excited by the prospect of such an on-air confrontation, put Frank on hold. As he was waiting on the line for a commercial break to end, Barbara walked into the room. “What are you doing, Frank?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I’m getting ready to talk to that broad, Kitty-Litter,” he said, “and ask her how she can write those things about my mother.”
“Oh my God,” Barbara exclaimed.
She ran to the phone and disconnected the call. “Will you please stop it?” she asked Frank. “Don’t give her the satisfaction of calling her! And on national television? Get a hold of yourself!”
“I believe that book made him ill,” said Tina. “I think Kitty Kelley taxed his life,” she added, “and for that I will never forgive her.”
In fact, Frank was hospitalized from November 9 through 16, at Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Springs, a month after the book was published. The diagnosis was acute diverticulitis, which is usually caused by poor diet resulting in a form of constipation that causes abscesses in the intestine. He had been performing at the Golden Nugget Casino in Atlantic City when he became ill.
His doctor, Dr. Alan Altman, said that Frank had to have a twelve-foot section of intestine removed during a delicate seven-and-a-half-hour operation. Frank was distressed by the operation and took it as yet another sign of old age. Bill Stapely remembered visiting him in the hospital. Frank had tears in his eyes. “I was surprised,” he said. “I’d never seen Frank cry before.”
When Frank saw his employee looking at him, he turned his head away and buried it in the pillow. Stapely reached out and took his boss’s hand and squeezed it. But Frank yanked it away. “Get away from me,” he hollered. “I don’t need you. Just get away.” Still, Bill stayed at his side and squeezed his hand a few moments longer as Frank went to sleep.
Prudent?
Naturally, Frank’s children were upset about his illness, as was Nancy. Making it worse for the Sinatra women was the acrimony that seemed to exist between them and Barbara whenever they visited Frank in the hospital. By this time, Barbara was accustomed to the fact that whenever Frank’s daughters were in her presence, there would be some sort of drama. However, she couldn’t deal with it when Frank was so sick. Of course, they felt the same way about her. Between what had been suppressed and what had been expressed, the years of resentment had taken a toll on everyone. At the hospital, the daughters felt that Barbara was emotionally unavailable to them. In their view, they were facing their father’s mortality for the first time. They felt that Barbara could have been empathetic, more supportive. Tina and Nancy approached Barbara to ask why she was being so distant toward them.
“As you both know, your father is a very private man, and he likes to keep these things priv
ate,” Barbara explained, according to Tina. She was polite but firm.
“But from us?” Tina and Nancy asked her, bewildered.
“I’m not saying that,” Barbara said, her manner very clipped. “I’m just saying that he would want me to be prudent in the way these things are handled.”
That testy exchange did little to make the Sinatra daughters feel any better about things. It continued to appear to them that Barbara was acting in a territorial and controlling way. While Frank was in the hospital, however, they agreed it was best to at least try to keep the tumult from him.
“I had a lot of surgery; they had to cut up my tummy pretty badly,” Frank recalled of the operation. “It was an intestinal infection that began to spread throughout my stomach and bowel and so forth. I was close to buying it. If I hadn’t come back from the trip I was on, I woulda bought it. They woulda had flowers and a big band behind the casket.”
After the operation, Frank would have to wear a colostomy bag for about a month and a half until his intestines healed. “Frank was destabilized by that operation,” Paul Anka would recall. “When I saw him backstage after a performance, he showed me the colostomy bag that he had to wear until his insides healed. He was humiliated by this and was not happy about going in again for his third operation.”
The doctors told Frank he had to deal with the colostomy bag for six weeks. Had they lost their minds? After two weeks, he was done with that phase and demanded that they go back in and do whatever they had to do to fix things so he no longer needed the bag. When he went into the hospital for a third operation, he asked Bill Stapely to accompany him into the operating room. “And if those doctors don’t get this thing right,” he told Stapely, “I want you to take a gun and shoot them bastards.”
When Bill saw Frank later in the recovery room, Sinatra asked him, “Are the doctors still alive?” The two shared a warm smile as Frank, still under the effects of the anesthesia, drifted back to sleep. Unfortunately, he would have to have yet another operation to reverse what he’d made the doctors do, and then wait six more weeks after that before the ordeal would be over. He was miserable, and most of his friends and family couldn’t help but blame it, at least partly, on the stress he felt over the Kitty Kelley book.
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