Lady Blue Eyes Read online

  This memoir is based on my recollection of events spanning more than eight decades, which may not be exactly as others recall them. Where conversations cannot be remembered precisely, I have re-created them to the best of my ability. Where people need to be protected or to avoid offense, I have altered names. Any mistakes are my own.

  Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Sinatra

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint their material:

  Daniel E. Kaplan: “It’s Vine on the Line!” by Daniel E. Kaplan. Reprinted

  by permission of the author.

  Shannon Moseley: “I’m Free” by Shannon Moseley. Reprinted by permission

  of the author.

  Principle Management: Excerpt from a speech given by Bono on the occasion

  of Frank Sinatra’s Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1994. Reprinted

  by permission of Principle Management on behalf of Bono.

  Frankie Randall: Lyrics from “Twenty Years Ago Today” by Frankie

  Randall. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sinatra, Barbara.

  Lady blue eyes : my life with Frank / Barbara Sinatra.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Sinatra, Frank, 1915–1998. 2. Singers—United States—

  Biography. 3. Sinatra, Barbara. I. Title.

  ML420.S565S59 2011

  782.42164092—dc22

  [B] 2010031907

  eISBN: 978-0-307-44994-8

  TITLE PAGE PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  COVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY BETTMANN/CORBIS

  v3.1

  Dedicated to the next generation,

  and especially my granddaughter,

  Carina Blakeley Marx

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Prologue: A Very Good Year

  ONE The House I Live In

  TWO New York, New York

  THREE Luck Be a Lady

  FOUR All or Nothing at All

  FIVE Fly Me to the Moon

  SIX Angel Eyes

  SEVEN Where the Air Is Rarefied

  EIGHT The Tender Trap

  NINE Love and Marriage

  TEN You Make Me Feel So Young

  Photo Insert

  ELEVEN Come Rain or Come Shine

  TWELVE I Get a Kick Out of You

  THIRTEEN What Now My Love

  FOURTEEN Body and Soul

  FIFTEEN That’s Life

  SIXTEEN Stormy Weather

  SEVENTEEN You Will Be My Music

  EIGHTEEN Put Your Dreams Away

  Epilogue: The Best Is Yet to Come

  Preface

  I have always been a private person, so the idea of writing a book about my life with Frank didn’t come naturally to me. My husband was also extremely private and never wrote his memoirs, although he did consider it for a while. I think if he had, though, his reminiscences would have been much more about the music than about the life.

  The decision to sit down with the writer Wendy Holden and bear witness came about because several of those closest to me persuaded me that I had a unique perspective on what it was like to live with Frank Sinatra, a man who still commands worldwide fascination years after his death. Who else but his widow could speak of him so honestly, writing an open love letter to her husband while revealing him as a fully rounded individual, brilliantly talented yet utterly human, warts and all? What really clinched the idea of a book for me, though, was the fact that Frank spent so much of his time trying to “set the record straight.” He was a prolific writer of letters to editors and publishers, in which he railed against the numerous lies, innuendos, and misrepresentations about him printed in articles and books across the globe. These mistruths tend to take on a life of their own, being repeated and embellished over the years until people believe them to be true.

  With Wendy’s gentle coaxing, I have drawn on my memories spanning eight decades to chronicle not only my twenty-six years with Frank but the journey my life took me on before I was even by his side. It has been quite an adventure, and when I look back on it now, I sometimes cannot believe that I managed to fit all this in during just one lifetime. In sharing my memories with those who still remember and revere Frank Sinatra, I hope that I have been able to present a different view, one that is written from the heart. This book is for Frank, the love of my life, and I am confident that he would fully support me in this. Most of all, I want everyone to know what a truly wonderful man he was and how, by becoming his bride, I ended up being the luckiest woman in the world.

  PROLOGUE

  With my wonderful husband.

  COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  A Very Good Year

  The year I married Frank Sinatra was a very good year. It was 1976, but it had taken us five years of flirting and courting to finally say “I do.” It probably took another year before I grew accustomed to the idea that I now carried his iconic name. At first, I’d almost whisper when booking a restaurant reservation or beauty parlor appointment. Even to say “Mrs. Sinatra” out loud felt like bragging.

  For a long time I had to pinch myself almost daily to believe that I, Barbara Ann Blakeley, the gangly kid in pigtails from the whistle-stop of Bosworth, Missouri, had somehow become the wife of Francis Albert Sinatra. Could I really be married to the singer whose voice I’d first heard at a drive-in when I was fifteen years old? “I’ll walk alone because to tell you the truth I’ll be lonely. I don’t mind being lonely when my heart tells me you are lonely too,” he sang with such sincerity at the height of the Second World War. Even though he didn’t make me swoon like some of the “bobby-soxers” at his concerts, the tenderness in his voice still melted my tomboy heart.

  Our love affair began almost thirty years later, long before we took the wedding-day vows that were to last for more than two decades. By then I was married to Zeppo Marx, the youngest of the famous comedy brothers. Our next-door neighbor Frank Sinatra had recently divorced for the third time and was dating some of the world’s most desirable women. I’d met his second wife, Ava Gardner, and Mia Farrow, his third. I’d seen Marilyn Monroe when she stayed with him not long before she died, and would meet Lauren Bacall, Kim Novak, Juliet Prowse, and Judy Garland, all of whom he’d stepped out with.

  Not that I was a complete naïf. As a young model and the wife of a gambler named Bob Oliver, I’d been wooed by John F. Kennedy. As a Las Vegas showgirl, I’d resisted Frank’s advances, and I’d lived with a television host named Joe Graydon. I’d been chased by some of the world’s most drop-dead, knockout movie stars, none of whom had anything on Frank. He had a sexual energy all his own. Even Elvis Presley, whom I’d met in Vegas, never had it quite like that.

  A big part of Frank’s thrill was the sense of danger he exuded, an underlying, ever-present tension only those closest to him knew could be defused with humor. One of the greatest things about Frank was that he loved to laugh. He not only surrounded himself with comedians like Don Rickles, Tom Dreesen, Joey Bishop, and Dean Martin (the most natural comic of them all) but took great delight in devising elaborate practical jokes. Even his fieriest Italian tantrum could be extinguished with a witty one-liner.

  On one of my earliest visits to Villa Maggio, his sprawling mountain home at Pinyon Crest high above Palm Springs, California, which he’d bought agains
t the fierce summer months, I joined in a late-night game of charades. I was on the opposing team to his, which included his drinking buddies the comedian Pat Henry, the golf pro Kenny Venturi, the songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, and Leo Durocher, the baseball manager. Having placed a large brass clock on my lap, I called time before Frank’s team guessed his charade—the government health warning on a pack of cigarettes.

  “Three minutes are up,” I cried gleefully. “You didn’t get it!”

  They began to howl their protests, but the look on Frank’s face as he rose to his feet silenced them all. “Who made you timekeeper anyway?” he barked, his eyes like blue laser beams.

  “Why, you did!” I replied.

  Frank snatched the clock from my lap and gripped it tightly in his hands. For a moment I thought he might hit me with it. Refusing to be intimidated, I stared him out until he turned and hurled the clock against the door, shattering it into a hundred pieces. Springs, coils, and shards of glass flew across the room. The clock face lay upturned on the floor, its hands forever fixed at a few minutes after 4:00 A.M.

  It was Pat Henry who broke the ensuing hush. The comic who opened Frank’s shows said, “I know what that charade is, Francis.”

  “What?” Frank spun round and scowled.

  “It was ‘As Time Goes By.’ ”

  When Frank’s face cracked into a broad grin, so did the rest of ours, none more gratefully than mine. The moment of danger had passed.

  What I saw that night was a glimpse of the complex inner character of the man known as the Entertainer of the Century. This was someone who had a God-given talent, The Voice. He’d clawed his way up from a tough childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, with an even tougher mother, Dolly, who’d alternately smacked him and pressed him to her bosom. He’d fought on the streets. He’d experienced the highs, lows, and then highs again of a performer’s life. He’d had his heart broken. By the time he turned his attentions to me, he was a fifty-five-year-old living legend who’d grown accustomed to getting his own way. He had money, power, and friends, all of which helped occupy his restless mind. The one thing he didn’t have, though, was love.

  Having been nothing but courteous for months, Frank first came looking for it my way at a gin rummy party he hosted at his house across the fairway from ours in Palm Springs, California. My husband, Zeppo, sat a few feet away, oblivious to the drama that was about to unfold. Our twelve-year marriage had long been dead. Twenty-six years older than me, Zeppo had been successful in vaudeville and manufacturing, but once he retired he preferred a routine of golf or sailing followed by early nights. Unable to relinquish the swinging lifestyle of his fraternal youth, he also dated other women. The Marx name and financial security he’d offered me and my son, Bobby, were all that was left of our once promising romance. I was bored and lonely by the time Mr. Sinatra aimed those eyes in my direction. The spark he ignited inside jerked me from my slumbers.

  Frank had been watching me all night as if he was seeing me for the first time. Sitting close, he called me “Barbara, baby” in that killer voice and flashed me a lopsided smile. He asked if anyone wanted “more gasoline” and offered to fix me a fresh martini. Taking my arm, he led me to the den. It was my turn to watch as he swirled vodka around a glass, reached for an olive and then some ice. A cigarette balanced on his bottom lip, a curl of blue smoke rising. He handed me my drink with a Salute! and then added softly, “Come sit with me awhile.”

  Thrown off guard by his sudden change of tack, I found myself directly in the path of that extraordinary force of nature. There was nowhere to run. Once he turned on the charm, my defenses rolled away like tumbleweed. Inhaling his heady scent of lavender water, Camel cigarettes, and Jack Daniel’s, I could do nothing but savor the moment of intoxication, oblivious to the consequences.

  As we settled onto a couch, our eyes met, and then he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. I knew with that first kiss that I was about to become another Sinatra conquest, and the thought snatched away what little breath he’d left me. Nothing more would happen that night. Not for weeks, months even. That was the way Frank liked to play his game. He’d set me spinning in his orbit, and it was only a matter of time before gravity would draw me inexorably toward him. Whatever was to follow from the discreet seduction he’d begun—and I didn’t dream then that it would amount to anything more than a fling—I awaited his next move with eager anticipation.

  Such was the power of the Sinatra magnetism that I didn’t really have a choice.

  ONE

  Me on the left, aged nine, with my sister, Pat, and my cousins,

  Shirley Jones and Don Kelly.

  COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  The House I Live In

  The lifetime members of the Spit ’N’ Argue Club settled into wooden chairs around the potbellied stove in my grandfather’s general store. For the next few hours they’d chew tobacco, sip coffee from enamel mugs, and complain about the price of corn.

  With their smell of tobacco and dried sweat, these were men I’d known all of my nine years, hardworking farmers from Carroll County, Missouri. Skipping into the store, my brown hair in braids, I headed for the long wooden counter and reached into a glass jar full of candy. Gummy beans were my favorites, so I grabbed a handful. Grandfather Hillis, known to me as Pa, stood with an apron tied around his girth in front of floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves. As I posted the first candy between my lips, he gave me a conspiratorial wink.

  “Hey, HH,” one of the men called out. “You oughta use some liver tonic on that kid. She’s way too skinny.” Skinny was a word I’d heard my whole life, along with bony and tall. Like my father, I towered over my friends.

  “I beg your pardon!” Pa replied. “My granddaughter’s not skinny—she’s streamlined.”

  My father, Willis, whose first name was really Charles, looked up from his butcher’s counter and gave me a shy smile, as did my uncle Bruce, who was in a corner stacking sacks of feed. The two brothers helped run the family business, Blakeley’s General Store, on Main Street, Bosworth, the only one of its kind for hundreds of “Missour-a” miles. The place that had first served the wagon trains of the pioneers sold just about everything a person might need, from sausages to nails. Homesteaders came by horse and cart to trade corn and beans for luxury goods such as coffee or shoes. For some reason, my father always insisted I wear stiff new high-tops laced tight to keep my ankles “thin as a racehorse’s.” It worked.

  In the basement, down treacherous stairs that were eventually to kill her, my grandmother Ma did the laundry and sold feed in between loading the furnace with coal. As the Depression deepened, she and Pa had no choice but to extend credit to their customers. Each night after dinner, my barrel-shaped Pa would tally up the day’s IOUs, clicking through them with a long, curved fingernail he kept especially for the task. Click-click it went, as I stared in fascination. After an hour or so, he’d fall asleep in his chair. Painting my mouth with Mother’s reddest lipstick, I’d plant a big kiss in the middle of his bald spot, knowing that the Spit ’N’ Argue Club would give him hell for it the following day.

  Blakeley’s General Store was the sanctuary to which I’d run three blocks almost every day after school with our bulldog, Brownie. It shielded me from my little sister, Patricia (who wanted to do everything I did), and chores such as collecting eggs, churning butter, picking fruit, or plucking chickens freshly beheaded by my ma. Within the store’s aromatic walls I could pick up free candy and an easy compliment. “Someday you’re gonna break boys’ hearts,” Pa would tell me, allowing me to hug and kiss him in a way I never could my folks.

  Having had my fill of gummy beans, I wandered out onto the wide front porch that fall afternoon in 1936 and drew my cardigan around me. A farmer rode up the gravel street, jumped off his horse, and tied its reins to the rail. Reaching out, I stroked the animal’s nose and pulled an apple from my pocket. Taking a bite, I offered it the rest on the flat of my palm.

  “Hey, Barbara,” the man sai
d, tipping his hat. “Could be a cyclone coming. Best git home.”

  I gazed in dismay at the leaden sky and hoped he was wrong. I hated going to the storm cellar dug out of the dirt under our house. My mother would lift the trapdoor, push us down the wooden steps, and follow with an oil lamp. We’d huddle together in the clammy space stacked with preserved goods—wax-sealed jars of pickles and fruit, most of which I’d helped peel, pulp, and prepare. There were also bottles of sweet cider and some kind of Irish whiskey. Once a year my grandfather would disappear down the steps, shut the trapdoor behind him, and get loaded. We’d hear him hollering and singing Celtic songs and knew to keep away.

  My mother hated the storm cellar too. I think it was one of the many things she disliked about what she called her “dull life.” Born Irene Toppass, she was a great beauty with Rochelle Hudson looks who hungered for more than Bosworth could offer. Our town of five hundred souls was so small that only Main Street had a name and there were no numbers on any of the houses. It had a barber’s shop, school, post office, drugstore, and doctor’s office. A railway line split Bosworth in two, but the trains generally sped through to someplace more interesting and few in town ventured beyond the boundary sign. My grandfather owned a Model T Ford, one of the only vehicles, but he walked to work each day, leaving it to gather dust in the garage.

  My mother rebelled against the dullness of her daily existence any way she could. Twelve years younger than my father, she was one of the few women in town who wore makeup and the only one who smoked cigarettes. A couple of times a month she’d dress up nice and drag my father to the Gem Movie Theater. Transfixed, she’d stare up at movies such as San Francisco with Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald, or Movietone newsreels about the reelection of Roosevelt, or the execution of the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, or the death of King George V of England. What Mother most enjoyed, though, were musicals, such as The Great Ziegfeld or anything featuring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The glamour of Hollywood was her only diversion from housework, sewing bees, bridge parties, and church socials.