Lady Blue Eyes Page 8

  The Cal Neva became controversial in Frank’s life later when some claimed he was too closely involved with the Mob there, but most of his show business friends knew more gangsters than he ever did. Even Zeppo consorted occasionally with those he called “the boys” when he co-owned the El Rancho casino. As Jack Benny once told me, “You have to socialize with those guys to a certain extent when they’re not only your employers but your greatest fans.” Frank Sinatra was the Italian idol—a Sicilian who’d made it to the top—so the wise guys treated him as their own. More important, the bosses owned the clubs where he and everyone else worked. He couldn’t just ignore those he referred to jokingly as “the Harvard Boys,” and with loyalty and friendship so important to Frank, he wasn’t prepared to.

  One of the people who’d been unable to come with us to the Cal Neva Lodge that opening weekend was Chico Marx, a fact that upset Zeppo greatly. Chico had been sick with heart problems for a while and knew his time was running out. He used to say to me, “Every morning I wake up, Barbara, I feel like I’m on velvet because I’m still alive.” In October of that year, though, Chico sadly lost his fight. Zeppo was grief-stricken. Chico was his big brother, the eldest of them all, and Zeppo had worshipped him. After the funeral, we went back to Groucho’s house for a wake. Crammed into the living room with scores of mourners, I noticed a strange woman staring at me. Zeppo noticed too and asked someone who she was. It was his first wife, Marion, a former Ziegfield girl he’d divorced seven years earlier, five years before he’d married me. A week later, I was playing tennis with Dinah Shore at the Racquet Club when I spotted Marion watching me in the same eerie way. I asked Dinah to introduce us. Marion was a little strange, but I think she just wanted to check me out. I felt sorry for her. She’d raised their adopted sons alone, and Zeppo showed little or no interest in them or her, it seemed. What really bothered me though was that he hadn’t even recognized the woman he’d been married to for twenty-seven years.

  Life and our routines went on, with the usual rounds of games and drinks, charity events, cocktails, parties, and dinners. We might have been in a rut, but boy, what a rut. I wasn’t complaining, and in those early years I was truly happy with Zeppo.

  I was certainly grateful for what he did for me and for Bobby; we had a beautiful home and everything we needed for a comfortable life. I never even had to cook, which is just as well because I might have killed somebody with my food. Zeppo seemed happy enough too, and I considered our marriage a success. In many ways, we were a typical couple, each with our own interests and hobbies. One day Zeppo decided he wanted to learn how to play the electric organ so that he could serenade me. (I guess he knew I had a thing for singers.) He ordered an organ from a shop in Long Beach, but being impatient, he wanted it delivered immediately. “But it’s the Easter holiday!” complained the shop owner, a man named Mr. Tonini. “I’m spending it with my family.”

  “Well, bring them along!” Zeppo suggested brightly. “Palm Springs is a beautiful place, and I’ll buy everybody lunch.” Sure enough, Mr. Tonini put the organ, his wife, and his five children in his station wagon and drove to the desert. When Zep saw all those kids, he made me take them straight to a table at Tamarisk while he went to the bar and stayed there. I sat with them, longing for some other company. Then I spotted Groucho. “Oh, look!” I cried. “There’s Groucho Marx. Wouldn’t you like to meet him?” The couple were big Marx Brothers fans, so I motioned over a reluctant Groucho. “This is Mr. and Mrs. Tonini,” I announced happily, “and these are all the little Toninis.”

  Groucho scowled and asked, “Are these all yours?”

  “Yes,” the shop owner replied proudly.

  “Been doing a lot of fucking, haven’t you?” Groucho commented before walking away.

  The indignant couple jumped up, grabbed their kids, and made for the door without finishing their lunch. Following them out apologetically, I spotted Harpo walking into the club. “Oh, there’s Harpo!” I cried with relief. “He adores children. Surely you’d like to meet him?” The Tonini family fled from me as if I had an infectious disease.

  One event in March 1962 that sent ripples around Palm Springs was the news that John F. Kennedy, the good-looking young politician who’d flirted with me on an ocean liner many years before, was coming to town.

  “JFK,” as he was now known, had been in Palm Springs two years earlier, immediately before his election as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. As Frank Sinatra had rallied his showbiz friends to support “the Jack Pack,” the president naturally stayed at the home of his staunchest supporter. Frank had a bronze plaque screwed to his guest room door that proudly read: JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE, NOVEMBER 6 AND 7, 1960. Everyone, especially Frank, assumed Jack would stay with him again.

  Eager to make his guests feel welcome, Frank spent thousands of dollars renovating his home. Even though he’d only just finished filming The Manchurian Candidate with Janet Leigh and was briefly engaged to the actress Juliet Prowse (about when some comedian claimed Frank had “longer engagements in Vegas”), he somehow found the time to arrange the building of a new guesthouse, a helicopter pad, and separate accommodations for the Secret Service. He even had a red telephone installed as a direct hotline to the White House. Frank’s builders were instructed to work around the clock, seven days a week, to finish in time for the presidential visit.

  Jack Kennedy had become like a modern-day pop star, and everyone, especially my Palm Springs girlfriends, wanted to catch a glimpse of him. “I’m going to plaster myself into the walls of the new Sinatra guesthouse and come bursting out when JFK’s in there alone!” declared one of our friends over a tennis lunch at the Racquet Club. Another proclaimed she was going to tunnel under the fairway to the Compound, while a third was going to set up a stall on the farthest green, convinced that Jack would need to buy lemonade from her in the unaccustomed heat. Never once hinting at my previous encounter with Jack in the Bahamas, I remained quietly bemused by all the fuss.

  As we sat around joking about the increasingly desperate plans to get to the president, two men in dark suits suddenly marched up and flashed us their Secret Service badges. The tallest of them asked, “Which one is Mrs. Marx?” Gulping down a mouthful of my Bloody Mary, I raised my hand sheepishly. “Right,” he announced, “come with us!”

  “Why? Where are you taking me?” I asked, sounding braver than I felt.

  “We’ve heard about your tunnel plan and the plastering job,” one of the agents replied. “We need to interview you about the president’s security.”

  I almost choked. Looking around at my companions, I couldn’t figure out why I, of all people, had been singled out. I rose from the table with as much dignity as I could muster as everyone watched in silence. I walked out of the restaurant flanked by these gorillas as my fellow club members looked on agog. It was only when I got outside that I spotted “the Singing Cop” Phil Regan laughing at me from a bush. The whole episode was a huge gag he’d set up. I could have killed that jokester.

  When Jack Kennedy eventually arrived in town, his presidential motorcade swept him straight past the Compound and on to Bing Crosby’s house in Thunderbird Heights. That was a terrible loss of face for Frank. The official reason given was security—Bing’s house was said to be safer because it backed onto a mountain, whereas Frank’s house was open on four sides. (It had nothing to do with the Tamarisk ladies’ fantasies, I promise.) Frank saw Jack’s decision to stay with Republican Bing as a direct snub. He was so hurt, especially after all the trouble he’d gone to, that when his friend and JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford told him the news, he cut Peter off there and then and never spoke to him again. Holding a grudge, Italian-style, was yet another side of the elusive, enigmatic Mr. Sinatra.

  I met up with Jack Kennedy again a couple of times during his visit. Even though he was married to Jacqueline by then with two small children, his friend Phil Regan, a kingpin in the Palm Springs social scene, was always trying to fix him
up with someone. The two men came to the Racquet Club when I was playing tennis one day, and Phil formally introduced me. I acted like we’d never met before, and so did Jack. We saw each other every now and again after that and were perfectly civil. Jack was a devout Catholic and went to church to pray for his family almost every day in between hitting on all the girls, which I thought strange. He even started flirting with me all over again. Eventually I asked him if he remembered our days on the Queen of Bermuda. He recalled the journey to New York but apologized that he had no memory of me. I guess I was just one face among many for JFK.

  It was eighteen months later, on a warm afternoon in November, when a news flash came on the car radio. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin from Dallas, Texas. Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade today,” it began. “First reports say that the president has been seriously wounded …” I had to pull the car over to the side of the road to compose myself and listen to the unfolding news. The next bulletin confirmed further reports that the president had been shot as he sat next to his wife, who’d then cradled him in her lap. Then came the dreadful news: “The president, ladies and gentlemen, is dead.” There was a long pause as the announcer fought to control his emotions. “This is the official word,” he said finally. “The president of the United States is dead.”

  When I eventually reached the Racquet Club and wandered, dazed, into the lounge, the atmosphere was like a morgue. Nobody knew what to say or do. People wept openly. Many were gathered around radios and a television set, which was flashing images of the scene in downtown Dallas. I couldn’t bear to look. Slumping into a chair, I could hardly believe that we’d lost the man so many saw as America’s knight in shining armor. All normal life seemed to stop as the realization sank in that the Kennedy dream and its promise of a better future were over.

  Frank Sinatra was devastated by the assassination of JFK, whom he described as “the brightest star in our lives.” As he had when Marilyn Monroe died the previous year, he mourned by locking himself alone in a room for days at a time. He was quoted around that time as saying, “I’m for whatever gets you through the night—be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.” I’m sure he needed all three when his nineteen-year-old son Frankie, also a singer, was kidnapped in Lake Tahoe the following month. When I heard the news, I sent Frank a note of support because I couldn’t imagine anything worse than my son being taken like that. Fortunately, the boy was safely returned five days later, after his father paid a ransom.

  Over the next few years, Zeppo and I began to see more of Frank, especially when he was in Palm Springs. He was at the peak of his success—touring, making movies, performing in Vegas, and producing one hit record after another. After announcing, “As an overprivileged adult, I’d like to help underprivileged children,” he took off on a seven-nation World Tour for Children in aid of charity. He always did at least a dozen benefits for various charities every year, for which he was never paid a penny. Extraordinarily, he’d even pay the orchestra himself. A charity that might hope for a hundred thousand dollars from an event would usually net around a million for a benefit Frank gave.

  When his World Tour for Children was finally over, Frank returned to the desert for the privacy and the climate he’d fallen in love with. Having broken up with the dancer Juliet Prowse, he married the twenty-one-year-old actress Mia Farrow, announcing, “Let’s say I’ve got a good five years left—why not enjoy them?” He divorced her almost as quickly. I read a rather sad quote from him after that in Life magazine that said, “If I did marry [again] it would have to be somebody out of show business, or someone who will get out of the business … All I ask is that my wife looks after me and I will see that she’s looked after.” There was such poignancy to that, I thought. Frank was still looking for love.

  Then to add to his woes, his father, Marty, died. I met Marty once, at a party Frank threw at the Compound. It was a big event attended by stars like Angie Dickinson, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Yul Brynner (whom Frank called “the Chinaman”) was there too, along with the usual suspects I was coming to know, such as Frank’s best friend and bodyguard, Jilly Rizzo. Marty was a great cook, as was Frank’s mother, Dolly, who’d stay up all night making what she called the “gravy” for the pasta while Jilly (whom she referred to as Fuck Face) dipped bread into it. Marty made the best gnocchi I ever tasted. He’d cook at some of his son’s parties when he was visiting from New Jersey and then he’d sit on his own in a corner. An illiterate boilermaker and fireman from a village near Palermo, Sicily, Marty could barely write his name and hardly spoke any English, so I sat with him and asked someone who spoke Italian to interpret for me.

  We got along famously as he told me about his life. Although he’d been a boxer in New Jersey under the pseudonym of Marty O’Brien, he insisted it was Dolly who was the real fighter, a woman who’d thump anyone who made a derogatory remark about Frank. He told me of the time she hit a would-be robber over the head with a blackjack and then sat on him screaming until the police arrived. As Marty spoke of the woman he’d eloped with on St. Valentine’s Day, he reminded me of my long-suffering father dealing with my willful mother. I only wished I’d picked up more Italian with Bob Oliver’s family, because I could have talked to Marty all night. Frank joined us for a while and took over the translating, and it was clear the two men adored each other. They also had a similar sense of humor. Frank told me that one of the few times his father ever saw him perform—in New York about when I was sighing over his songs back in Wichita—the screams of his fans were so loud that when Frank asked Marty what he thought of the concert, his father told him, “I couldn’t hear a fucking thing!”

  Sadly, with heart problems and emphysema, Antonino Martino Sinatra went into a terminal decline at age seventy-four. Frank, who’d slept in his father’s hospital room at the end and said Marty was one of the greatest men he ever knew, was shattered by his passing. Dolly was equally devastated, and at Marty’s funeral in New Jersey, attended by thousands of Frank’s fans, she tried to throw herself into the grave.

  Dolly was one tough dame. She was only a little woman with deep blue eyes and a cherubic face, but her looks were deceiving. She’d been the head of a union, a midwife, and a bartender—among other things—and had a mouth on her like you wouldn’t believe. She was physically abusive to Frank when he was a kid and knocked him around a lot. She even threw him down the stairs once, but she always claimed she was only toughening him up for the neighborhood. “I put the condition on him,” she used to say. She also taught him how to cook, and boy, could Frank cook.

  Although he had help in the kitchen, he cooked Italian food almost every day because that was all he really liked to eat. Lord help anyone who overcooked the pasta or tried to serve him ketchup. He loved good peasant fare, although strangely for an Italian, he didn’t like garlic—an aversion he claimed came from when Dolly would tie an entire bulb around his neck if ever he had a chill as a child. He might sauté a little garlic for a sauce, but then he’d throw it away. During a film he made with Gina Lollobrigida in 1959 called Never So Few, she allegedly ate an entire bulb of raw garlic just before a kissing scene to spite him.

  The dish Frank’s friends enjoyed the most was one he’d get up and make for us in the early hours, when everyone was loaded. He’d place a pot of salt water on the stove, cook the pasta until it was al dente, drain it, then crack two eggs into it and grate plenty of Parmesan cheese over it before adding lots of olive oil, salt, and pepper. The hot pasta would cook the eggs. It was wonderful and the best thing to eat at three or four in the morning.

  Another specialty of Frank’s was pasta fagioli, which he and Dean Martin pronounced “fajool.” It was Dean’s favorite, and the two of them would happily finish off a whole pot together. Frank worshipped Dean, not just for his love of all things Italian but for his ability to make Frank laugh. As he always said, “Dean isn’t just funny, he thinks funny.”


  Generally speaking, Frank was very good with the staff and never lost his temper with them, but one night when we had a full house and everyone was seated for dinner, the veal dish I’d asked for came out undercooked. I took one bite and had it sent back. Our chef sadly took offense and began throwing things around the kitchen, rattling pans and breaking dishes. Everybody heard, but nobody knew what to say. Frank smiled, asked to be excused, and got up from the table. Beyond the kitchen door, he told the chef, “I’m going to count to three, and you’d better get your fat ass out of here or else!” Even though that chef was a big guy, he couldn’t run out of there fast enough.

  Another night, we were in Matteo’s, an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, when the pasta was served soggy. Frank hated that more than anything else and stormed into the kitchen. Looking around, he held up his hands and cried, “Where are all the Italians?” The staff was Filipino. He came back into the dining room and, furious, picked up his plate of pasta and threw it against the wall, splattering tomato sauce all down it. Before walking out, he examined the mess he’d made and, using his finger, wrote: “Picasso.” Later, the owner—his childhood friend Matty Jordan—put a frame around Frank’s unorthodox work of art.

  When we weren’t seeing Frank socially, Zeppo and I muddled along with dinners and parties as well as keeping up with the constant rounds of gin, golf, and tennis—the last often played on Frank’s court, which was the closest.