Lady Blue Eyes Read online

  • • •

  Frank’s mother, Dolly, and I had resolved our differences by the time her only son told her we were getting married. Once she realized we were serious, she was great and understood that she and I shared the same agenda—to make Frank happy.

  She had moved to Palm Springs from the house Frank had bought her and Marty in Fort Lee, New Jersey, so that she could be nearer her son. She loved the bungalow he gave her on the edge of the Compound and the fact that she was so close by. Several times a month, she’d invite us over for delicious Italian suppers that she’d spent the entire day preparing. Frank always teased her a lot, and one night he took along a can of pork and beans and put it on his plate. The look on her face as she was about to serve him her famous meatballs was priceless.

  At around this time, I decided to convert to Catholicism. I thought, I’ve been Methodist, Jewish, and now Catholic. I might as well. At least I’ll have all the bases covered. Frank wasn’t nearly as religious as his mother and went to church only at Christmas—we’d usually go to midnight Mass after a party at our house. He never asked me to change faith for him, but I could tell he was pleased that I’d consider it, especially as my doing so would smooth our path with Dolly.

  The next thing I knew I was in Catholic school learning all about my new faith. I studied for about a year. Unlikely as it sounds, Dolly, that tough old dame from Hoboken, became my catechism coach and enlisted her favorite priests, Fathers Rooney, Blewitt, and Geimer, to help us. As she trained me in the finer points of Catholicism, we finally became friends. I think she realized at last what so many people had been saying—that I was good for Frank.

  Even when I was with Zeppo, she’d come to realize that I was someone she could rely on. She’d ask my help with problems and the unlikeliest of tasks. By the time I was engaged to Frank, that dependence had increased tenfold. One day Dolly called to tell me, “Barbara, I’ve got mice. What should I do?”

  “Get some cats.”

  “Where from?”

  “The pound.”

  “Will you take me?”

  So I drove her to the pound, picked out a couple of cats, stopped in at a vet’s for them to get their shots, and delivered them back to her house. A few weeks later she called me up again. “Barbara, these frigging cats have a skin condition called infantigo, and now I’ve got it! I’m itching all over. Will you come and pick these mothers up?” I went over and collected the cats, took them back to the vet, and finally took them to live in Zeppo’s house, where they became best friends with his two Weimaraners, Fleet and Sandy. The only trouble was Zeppo caught infantigo from them as well, whereas I seemed to be immune.

  I had never forgotten Walter Annenberg’s promise to me about marrying Frank. The two men had been friends ever since Walter and his wife, Lee, met Frank in Palm Springs in the 1950s. I tracked Walter down in London and placed a telephone call. “Are you sitting down?” I asked him. “You won’t believe it, but Frank and I are finally getting married.”

  “That’s wonderful news, Barbara!”

  “We’d like to take you up on your offer to be married at Sunnylands.”

  “Great! When?”

  “We were thinking it would be nice to get married on Bobby’s birthday in October.”

  Walter was horrified. “You can’t possibly wait that long! Frank’s far too mercurial. It’ll have to be sooner than that. I’ll be in Palm Springs July tenth through twelfth.”

  July was only two months away, but 7/11 had always rolled nicely off the tongue, so that was the date we picked. We were to be married in the main house in front of two hundred guests before relocating to the Compound for a reception catered by Chasen’s. Lee promised to take care of everything at the Sunnylands ceremony with the help of Harriet Deutsch, another old friend of Frank’s. It was so wonderfully kind of them.

  To try to keep the media from intruding, we claimed that the Annenbergs were throwing us an engagement party and that we’d be marrying sometime later, at a venue to be announced. I went to see Zeppo a few days beforehand and told him the same story. His house looked out onto Sunnylands, and I didn’t want him to hear it from anyone else. He seemed to take my news quite well and wished me every happiness, but there was a new sadness about him, I thought. When the press approached him later, he told them, “Barbara is a wonderful lady. Frank Sinatra could never find a better woman.” Ever the gambler, he added, “I’m sorry I lost her, but that’s the way it goes. You win some and you lose some.”

  As the big day approached, people began to fly into Palm Springs from around the world. To welcome them all the night before the wedding, Frank threw a party at a favorite haunt of his, the Ingleside Inn. A Spanish-style resort set on twenty acres, the inn had everything, including a pool, an award-winning restaurant, and the seclusion we wanted. Halfway through the evening Frank was looking around the reception when he spotted a stranger. Fearing it might be a reporter, he said to Jilly, “See the guy at ten o’clock? As you’re showing him out, find out who he is.”

  Jilly approached the man and said to him, “Let’s go, buster. You can tell me what you’re doing here while you’re walking.”

  The man held up his hands and cried, “But I’m Judge Walsworth! I’m the one who’s going to marry them!” None of us had met him yet. The entire event was like that, funny and exciting and crazy. I had the feeling that absolutely anything could happen, and why wouldn’t I feel that way? The impossible had already happened. Barbara Ann Blakeley from Bosworth, Missouri, was marrying Frank Sinatra.

  On the morning of our wedding, July 11, 1976, I awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. “Good morning, sweetheart,” Frank said. “I can’t wait to marry you today. How long are you going to be?”

  I got up, took a shower, and peered out at the world. This was it, the day I’d been waiting for with all my heart. I could hardly believe it. Opening the window to breathe in some fresh air, I was blasted by a wave of heat. It must have been 120 degrees in the shade and it was only nine in the morning. What was I thinking, getting married in July?

  With the help of my matron of honor, Bee Korshak, I gathered my clothes together and prepared to go over to the Compound. Bee had become my closest girlfriend in Palm Springs. A beautiful blonde who’d once been an ice skater, she also had a terrific sense of humor with a wicked side to it even though she came from Mormon stock. “The Mormons don’t drink and they don’t smoke, but they sure fuck a lot!” she’d say with a wink.

  Whenever I had one of my fights with Frank and needed to escape, I’d call Bee and say, “Let’s go somewhere!” and she’d always reply, “Okay.” She didn’t care where we went or what we did. Her husband, Sidney, was usually working hard in Chicago or New York (when he wasn’t negotiating my divorce from Zeppo), and she was game for anything. We traveled throughout Europe, went for a spa break in Arizona with Dinah Shore and Veronique Peck, and took shopping trips to New York. Bee and I knew that as soon as bouquets of flowers began to crowd my hotel suite, Frank was ready to make up. His message might say something like “Come back, although if you can put up with me you’re crazier than I am.” I wasn’t always ready to go home immediately, so I’d stay on for a few extra days with Bee just to make him wait.

  Because the world’s media had suspected all along that Frank and I were not merely getting engaged, Palm Springs was choked with TV crews, press photographers, and reporters. Lee Annenberg sent out trays of water and iced tea so that no one died of the heat. To avoid prying eyes, I went to Frank’s house the back way, across the golf course. My mother was waiting, and she and Bee helped get me ready. I couldn’t help wondering what Irene Blakeley was thinking as she helped me slip into my wedding dress that day. Back in the thirties, she’d been brave enough to rattle the bars of her Bosworth cage and rail against its confines. “Will-is!” she’d cry. “There are much better opportunities for us elsewhere.” She could never have imagined how much better those opportunities would be, especially for me. In spite
of our many differences of opinion over the years, I never forgot what she did for me. Thanks to her drive and determination, I’d embraced opportunity after opportunity as it came my way and was now taking on the greatest challenge of my life. As I stared at my own reflection in the mirror, just as I had stared at hers when I was a little girl, I knew I had inherited both her looks and her courage.

  My wedding gown was made by the designer Halston and was off one shoulder in beige. He’d added drifts of chiffon and a single flowing sleeve. He made me an almost identical dress in pink satin for the evening party; both of them were my “something new.” My “old” was an emerald and diamond brooch belonging to Bee, my “borrowed” was a lace handkerchief from my mother, and I wore a blue garter. I asked Frank to wear a brand-new beige silk and linen suit to match my dress and he carried the baby rings he’d given his children as his something old and borrowed. He wore a blue cornflower in his lapel.

  Frank and I had never talked about me signing any sort of prenuptial agreement, and I was kind of surprised at that, given his history. Then when we went to collect our marriage license a few weeks before the wedding, he asked me if I had the twenty-dollar fee. As I reached into my purse and pulled out the money, he took it from me with a grin that let me know it was a setup for the words he wanted to say. “This will be the last thing you ever have to pay for,” he told me with a kiss. I had no reason to doubt him.

  On the morning of our wedding, Frank’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, knocked on the door of my room and asked me to go with him and Sidney Korshak to one of Frank’s guesthouses. With my hair still in curlers, I did as they asked. They invited me to sit down. Then Mickey, a cigar in his mouth, slid a document across a table and said, “You have to sign this, Barbara, before you marry Frank.”

  I glanced down, looked up at the two men, and asked, “What is it?”

  “A prenup.”

  I was shocked. “Does Frank know about this?”

  “Of course he does,” replied Mickey.

  I flicked through the pages of what looked like a complicated legal contract and tried to buy some thinking time. I had few qualms about signing a prenup, but I wasn’t so happy about the timing and the fact that I hadn’t been given a chance to have anyone look at it on my behalf.

  “I really don’t think I want to sign this right now,” I said finally, pushing the document away.

  “Unless you do, there’ll be no wedding,” Mickey replied. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was serious.

  A few hundred yards from where I sat, frozen in indecision, I could hear the caterers laying out the tables in the Compound’s Grand Hall. In an hour or so our guests would arrive. They’d include the future president Ronald Reagan. Looking up at the man who’d held my hand through my divorce negotiations with Zeppo, I asked, “Sidney, have you seen this?”

  “No, Barbara,” he replied. “But if you sign this, you’ll be safe.”

  Taking the pen Mickey offered me, I decided to trust my best friend’s husband, and so I signed. “If that’s all, gentlemen,” I said, rising to my feet, “I’m getting married today.”

  As I left the guesthouse, Sidney gave me a knowing look. I knew then that he would take care of me whatever happened. In any event, I thought the document I’d just signed would probably come into play only if Frank and I divorced, and after all the trouble I’d gone through to get Frank to the altar, I had no intention of divorcing him. Nor would I let anything spoil my day. Squeezing Sidney’s arm, I went to prepare to meet my groom, happy in the knowledge that Frank and I would never discuss money again.

  Once I was ready to leave for the ceremony, I walked to the bar to meet Frank. An enormous smile lit up his face. “You look stunning, sweetheart.” He looked extremely dashing in his suit, so I said, “You don’t look so bad yourself!” I never worried about it being bad luck for him to see me before the wedding; it was hardly the first time around for either of us, and we loved the idea of arriving together. We crossed the golf course and entered Sunnylands via the back gate, and then Frank took his place in the main drawing room. He waved cheerily at all our guests and quipped, “Good-bye, y’all!”

  My father was waiting to walk me down the aisle. The retired butcher who never thought he’d leave Bosworth was more nervous than I’d ever known him be. Willis Blakeley and I were a long way from Pa Hillis’s general store and the Spit ’N’ Argue Club. Any apprehension we had, though, was broken by the sound of Frank’s voice yelling: “Hurry up, Barbara! Everyone thought I was the one who wasn’t going to be here!” Laughing, my father gave the signal that we were ready, and the opening chords of “True Love” were struck up by Jimmy Van Heusen, who was playing the piano without any socks. Taking my father’s arm, I walked down a long corridor of white marble lined with some of the most fabulous Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings in the world, but I barely noticed them. When we turned the corner into the vision of loveliness that was the drawing room, I felt as if I had stepped into a scene from High Society. Only this was for real.

  Real or not, ours felt like a fairy-tale wedding. Everything was fun and sentimental rolled into one. Bobby stood smilingly waiting for me a few steps away from Frank, whose eyes filled with tears of joy. Full of emotion, we took our places in front of the huge black marble fireplace under a famous Seurat painting, flanked by a Gauguin and a Van Gogh. Giant cloisonné cranes with flowers in their beaks perched on either side of us. The fireplace was dripping in gardenias as well as white roses, white chrysanthemums, and white orchids, all grown in the Annenberg greenhouses. Even though it was sweltering outside, it was a perfumed sixty-eight degrees in that room.

  Many were surprised that Jilly Rizzo wasn’t Frank’s best man, but in truth Jilly wouldn’t have been comfortable having to stand up and speak in front of two hundred people, so he happily took a ringside seat and organized security. The man Frank chose instead was Freeman Gosden—the actor who’d played Amos in the popular radio comedy Amos ’n Andy and whom Frank had known for years. Freeman was a gentle man from the South, perfect for this role and for the speeches to be made later.

  Judge Walsworth began the ceremony, and suddenly the whole event took on a serious note. This was it, then. We were really getting married. I looked at Frank and he looked at me and neither of us looked as if we were about to bolt. When the judge reached the part where I was asked to take Frank for richer or poorer, my husband-to-be interjected, “Richer, richer!” which made everyone crack up, even Dolly, who was there to give us her support. I’d told Frank before the wedding that he didn’t have to wear a ring, but he’d insisted, telling me he’d be “proud to.” During the repeating of our wedding vows, I slipped a plain Bulgari band on his ring finger, and he presented me with an eternity ring of tiny diamond baguettes, which perfectly complemented my killer engagement ring.

  Declared husband and wife at last, Frank and I kissed and laughed and embraced and cried all at once. It was utterly wonderful. Champagne corks popped all around us, and we toasted each other beneath an exquisite Rodin statue of Eve. Lee had had a wedding cake made for us, similar to the one we had waiting at the Compound, and so with a knife decorated with gardenias and stephanotis, we cut into it. Someone called out, “Make a wish!” but Frank sweetly said that he couldn’t wish for anything more than his “beautiful bride.” Ronald Reagan, the Republican presidential contender, piped up, “If you can’t think of anything to ask for, I could make a suggestion!”

  A fleet of air-conditioned buses ferried our guests back across the golf course for a buffet dinner at the Compound. The Grand Hall was decorated with white and yellow chrysanthemums, yellow roses, and carnations in Frank’s favorite color, orange, which always made him feel happy. After we’d formally greeted our guests, I changed into my evening dress and then wandered among the friends and family who’d traveled from afar to help us celebrate this momentous day. Our friends from Hollywood, New York, Palm Beach, Chicago, and Europe mingled with buddies from the
old days. Everyone was there, from my aunts and uncles to Greg and Vero Peck, Cary Grant, Kirk and Anne Douglas, and the entire Nixon Kitchen Cabinet. Roz Russell was there, even though she would die of cancer two months later and kept having to give herself morphine shots.

  My father was very happy that day, especially when I told him he wouldn’t have to make a speech. Once he’d gotten over his nerves and taken me to Frank’s side, he was able to enjoy the proceedings. I watched him and my mother being introduced to politicians, movie stars, and billionaires, and was quietly amazed. They chatted with our guests as if they’d always had that kind of life. During the reception, various guests stood up and spoke if they felt like it, which made everything even more fun and spontaneous. Walter Annenberg said a few words, as did Ronald Reagan. Freeman’s speech had great humor in it, and Judge Walsworth offered a prayer. Then Frank got up and said a lot of lovely things about me. He was such a great speaker.

  Frank’s friend Pat DiCicco sought me out during the reception. “Please, Barbara,” he said, “do me a favor. Stay married for at least three months.”

  “This is our wedding day, for Pete’s sake! What are you saying?” I asked. Then I figured it out. “So who do you have a bet with?”

  “Paul Mano,” he replied sheepishly. “Don’t say anything, but whatever happens, don’t get a divorce for at least twelve weeks, okay?” I have no idea how much those two bet, but knowing them, it was a lot. Pat was once married to Gloria Vanderbilt, and Paul wasn’t short of a buck or two. Of course, Pat won the bet. In fact Frank and I made it not just to our third month but into our third decade. I should have insisted on a cut.

  My wedding gift to Frank was a Jaguar sports car in British racing green, the first twelve-cylinder and fastest Jaguar ever made. I’d hidden it at the Annenbergs’ and had someone drive it out and present it to him halfway through the reception. He was thrilled. Then during dinner, Frank disappeared, and just as I was wondering where he’d gotten to, I looked outside and gave a delighted shriek. Coming through a gate in the hedge was a peacock blue Rolls-Royce with half a dozen yellow roses tied to the windshield. Frank, who’d changed into a silk shirt that matched my dress, drove it right up to the picture window of the room where we were all eating, a boyish grin on his face. The evening party went with a swing after that. I can’t even remember what time we went to bed.