Lady Blue Eyes Read online

  I played with the future vice president Spiro Agnew there and other guests of Frank’s, but one of my most memorable doubles matches was with Bobby Kennedy, the former U.S. attorney general, who came to town not long after his brother had been assassinated. Dear Harpo had died by then, and Bobby and Ethel were staying at El Rancho Harpo, owned by mutual friends. It was they who asked me to make up a foursome, and as I recall, Bobby and I whipped them. He was a good player and nice enough, but he never had the charisma of his older brother and always lived in his shadow. Frank certainly didn’t like him much and felt that Bobby had turned against him despite all he’d done to help get Jack elected. A few years later Bobby too was shot dead, at a hotel in Los Angeles. The glory days were over for the Kennedys, it seemed.

  I carried on with my charity work and became head of entertainment for an organization that helped war orphans. The first year I was involved, I asked Dinah Shore to perform at the gala, and the next year I invited Lena Horne. Soon after I announced her name, a woman on the executive committee of the charity came to see me. Without flinching, she told me, “Barbara, I’m sorry, but we can’t have blacks. If we have them perform for us, then they have to sit down and eat with us!” As I stared at her openmouthed, my mind flashed back to the black boy at school in Wichita and the prejudice of my youth. Had nothing changed? That’s when I knew that her organization was not the one for me. I resigned immediately, telling her that bigotry and charity did not belong together. I decided to find another organization to devote my energies to; it took a while before I found the right one.

  Zeppo’s next-door neighbor on the other side was Hal Wallis, the producer of movies like Casablanca. His sister Mina, who was possibly the most unattractive woman I’d ever seen, was his head of casting and a major player. Mina had a casting couch on which she was supposed to have bedded all the greats, including Clark Gable. When she moved to Palm Springs, she called me up. “Hello, Barbara,” she said, without introducing herself. “We have to know each other. I’ve just moved here, and you and I have a lot of the same friends.”

  “Well, who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m Mina Wallis and I’m very important and I understand that you have a lifestyle that I like,” she continued. “You go to the Racquet Club to play tennis and then you like to have lunch and then you like to play gin.”

  “That pretty much describes it,” I replied.

  “Well, could you pick me up tomorrow morning? I’d like to go with you.”

  I had to laugh. “Oh, is that what you’d like to do?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “See you at eleven.” Then she hung up.

  From that day on, she attached herself to me and wanted to do everything I did. It reminded me of my kid sister when we were small. Worst of all, she cheated at gin, and that’s when I really lost it with her. Eventually, I had to say, “Don’t call me and don’t come around anymore.”

  A few days later she invited me to lunch, but I was on my way out. “Please drop by,” she pleaded. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” So I stopped in and found a stranger standing in her living room. “Meet GG,” Mina said. I recognized the profile immediately. It was Greta Garbo in slacks and a blouse, and she held out her hand and said, “Vunderful to meet you, Barbara,” then offered nothing more. Sadly, I had to run, so I missed my chance to get to know the screen legend and find out if she truly was as aloof as she seemed.

  Mina and I eventually patched things up, and I have to admit that she was an amazing powerhouse of a woman; she knew everyone, and if you asked her to do something, she would get it accomplished. When she eventually got sick and was dying, all the great stars went to see her, so maybe all her casting-couch stories were true. I guess we’ll never know.

  Wanting my parents near me, I made the down payment on a house for them in Palm Springs and they moved there from Long Beach. My father worked as a butcher to pay the mortgage, and my mother did whatever she could. Zeppo could have helped them out much more than he did, but he really didn’t want anyone else around us—least of all my family. Although he’d been generous when we first met (and my parents adored him to the day he died), his tightness began to get to me.

  Bobby didn’t always get along with him either, and I think Zeppo tolerated him only because he knew my son and I were joined at the hip. One day, though, Zep flipped about something Bobby had done, and I came home to find his hands around my teenage son’s throat. He looked as if he could kill him. After pulling the two of them apart, I told Bobby, “Go pack your things. We’re leaving.” As I threw my clothes into a suitcase, Zeppo began crying and pleading, “Please, Barbara, don’t leave me,” until I eventually agreed to stay. Apart from anything else, I had no place to go.

  Not long after that, Bobby, who’d always been a straight-A student, lost interest in his studies and his grades started to drop. When he announced that he wanted to move to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, famous for the birth of psychedelic rock, I was horrified. “But, Bobby, this is your home!” I said.

  Defiantly he said, “I’m going to move there and you can’t stop me.”

  “But where would you live?”

  “I’ll find someplace,” he declared.

  This went on for days; then one morning I told him, “All right, then. I’ll take you to the bus station, give you a hundred dollars, and you can buy a ticket to San Francisco.” He hesitated briefly before packing a bag and getting into the car. We were three-quarters of the way to the bus station when he turned to me and said, “Mother, I don’t think I want to go to Haight-Ashbury after all.”

  I pulled over, switched off the engine, and said, “I’m so happy you said that, Bobby, because I really want you to stay.” It was the only time I ever used tough love on him. I don’t know what I’d have done if he’d gone through with it. Once we returned home, things were a lot better. We found him a great new high school called Cate in Carpinteria, where he made some lifelong friends. That place really saved his life.

  Bobby had gone through so much by the time he was a teenager, but he never threw it back at me, never. His real father was bumming around Europe trying to make movies, Joe Graydon was a distant memory, and Zeppo didn’t much care. It’s so hard to keep children grounded, but it’s amazing to me how grounded Bobby still is. Open and honest, he is a very special guy. Even now, every time I look at him I know that I did something right.

  Zeppo and Bobby made up their differences in later life and became friends, for which I am truly grateful. But at that point our marriage was strained, even more so after I caught Zep red-handed with some other women. It happened when I decided to make a surprise visit to the Barbara Ann, moored at Newport Beach. As I arrived, there was a party in full swing. The boat was full of girls drinking and having a good time. Zeppo was nowhere to be seen, but I suspected he was belowdecks. A woman in a skimpy bikini came up to me and asked, “Who are you?”

  I gave her a steely stare. “Well, who are you?”

  “I’m the hostess of this party!” she declared triumphantly.

  “I’m Mrs. Marx,” I replied. “Barbara Ann Marx?”

  I watched as she shrank away to find Zeppo, but before she could, I left. Tellingly, his infidelity didn’t hurt anything other than my pride. I guess it only confirmed what I’d suspected for some time—that Zeppo was the third man in succession to let me down. I reasoned that, although our marriage was a sham, at least now we could both be honest about it. To keep me sweet, Zeppo finally took me on a promised trip to Europe with his friend the producer Harold Mirisch, who was making a movie in France. From the minute our plane landed, though, Zeppo wanted to go home. He missed playing golf, the desert climate, and his friends; he was utterly miserable. When we bumped into the Hollywood agent and his friend Swifty Lazar in a nightclub in Paris, I wanted to dance that night but Zeppo didn’t want to, nor did he want me to. The only person who had the nerve to ask me onto the dance floor was Swifty, who was so short that his famously oversize spe
ctacles remained level with my cleavage the entire time.

  We eventually cut short our grand European tour and returned home, where Zeppo reluctantly agreed to accept more invitations to events he knew I’d enjoy. Among those were the repeated requests for our company from Frank. From the late sixties, we were probably invited to the Compound or to eat out with Frank once or twice a week. We’d go to restaurants or to parties at the homes of mutual friends. We’d have them all back occasionally, but not often because Zeppo was never very agreeable to that and Frank always liked a lot of people around him so it would have to be a big production.

  There were plenty of others who were happy to throw parties for him anyway, so we were usually invited along to those. At one, I was introduced to the singer Judy Garland, an old friend of Frank’s and the woman who gave “the Holmby Hills Rat Pack” (as Frank and his pals were known) little rat stick pins. Frank hated the Rat Pack moniker almost as much as he ended up disliking being called “the Chairman of the Board”—a name his friend the New York radio presenter William B. Williams coined for him. “What does that mean anyway?” he’d ask, frowning. “Chairman? There’s nowhere to go after that.” I almost didn’t recognize Judy Garland; she was so enormous and puffy-faced. It was sad to see her like that. Frank didn’t seem to notice and was as protective of Judy as he had always been of Marilyn. He’d been with Judy the night her daughter Liza was born and ordered everybody pizzas during the labor. He claimed that Liza’s first cries sounded to him like music from an Italian opera—“a star had been born.”

  The more I came to know Frank, the more I liked him. I was especially impressed by the way he treated others. Whenever we went out to a restaurant or club, I couldn’t help but notice how differently people behaved around him. The excitement was tangible; from the moment Frank walked into a room in that slow, easy way of his, there’d be a buzz. Everyone from the staff to the customers would stare, and they’d never stop. Sooner or later the paparazzi would arrive, peering through the windows with their lenses. Frank disliked most of the press, but he’d happily sign autographs for fellow diners or waiting staff and pose for photographs until everyone was happy.

  When we went out to eat, Frank almost always picked up the tab. He couldn’t have cared less about money, and I honestly think he planned on spending every dime he ever made; he certainly spent cash like a drunken sailor. As Don Rickles once said, “Frank gets up in the morning and God throws money on him.” When we arrived anywhere, Frank would hand Jilly a stack of hundred-dollar bills (which he called “C-notes”) and say, “Take care of all the busboys and waitresses.” His tipping was legendary, especially to the little guys. At one restaurant we went to, we were waiting for our car afterward and Frank handed the valet parker two hundred-dollar bills.

  “Thank you, Mr. Sinatra!” the kid cried delightedly.

  “Is that the biggest tip you ever had?” Frank asked with a smile.

  The young man looked coy. “Well, no, sir.”

  Frank frowned. “What the? Who the hell gave you more than that?”

  “Why you did, Mr. Sinatra. Last week!”

  Perhaps not surprisingly because of the attention he attracted, Frank often preferred to stay home, but his dinners at the Compound were always fun affairs peppered with the most interesting guests. All the big names would be there, of course, the major stars and Hollywood producers plus numerous wives, girlfriends, and starlets. But then he’d throw industrialists like John Kluge, Laurance Rockefeller, or Kirk Kerkorian into the mix as well as Italian American friends of his and Jilly’s from the early days, men who stood or sat on the periphery, eating pasta and saying little.

  I soon came to appreciate that Ermenigildo “Jilly” Rizzo was the brother Frank never had. They’d first met in Miami Beach in the fifties, and Jilly soon became one of the most important people in Frank’s life. Although Jilly had his own nightclub, called Jilly’s Saloon, on West Fifty-second Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan (the place for Chinese food), he gave it to his brother to run so that he could move with Frank to California. They both knew it was important that Frank have someone he knew and trusted watching his back as part of what he called his “Dago Secret Service.” Jilly was blind in one eye but could look at a stadium of twenty thousand people and pick out the sole troublemaker. He was a “deez, demz, and doze” guy who spoke with a monotone New York accent and said things like “Ax me anything,” “When the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me,” or once, when a friend died in his sleep, “He woke up dead.”

  The famed TV producer George Schlatter once wrote a speech for Jilly at a birthday celebration for Frank. George introduced Jilly as “the Harvard professor of elocution,” and then Jilly stood up and recited a poem by someone he called “Rudolf Kipling” before ending with “… by the living God that made yous, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,” adding, “Whoever the fuck that was!” Frank collapsed laughing.

  Jilly was married to Honey, a woman Frank called “the Blue Jew” because she dyed all her hair blue (and I mean all). The relationship didn’t last, not least because she and Jilly used to have some knock-down, drag-out fights. Even after my early experience with Bob Oliver’s family, it took me a long time to realize that Italians like to fight and it doesn’t mean anything. At Jilly’s Saloon, he employed an irreverent Chinese cook named Howie. Late at night after a show, Frank would get on the funnel down to the basement kitchen and yell, “Howie! Send up some food.”

  Howie would reply, “Fut you, Mr. Sinatra!” and Frank would shout back, “Fut you too, Howie!” Years later, Frank bought him a watch and sent it to be engraved. He told the jewelers that he wanted “Fut you, Howie!” written on the back, but they said they couldn’t possibly. “Why ever not?” Frank countered innocently. “FUT U is the name of a university.” They bought it.

  Jilly would help Frank decide what food should be served at his parties and which music should be played because Jilly had a great ear. He and Frank loved all the greats, especially the old standards, but they liked a lot of modern music too. What Frank couldn’t stand was to hear himself sing because he’d always find a flaw. His attitude in the studio was record it, press it, and print it, and then he never wanted to hear it again. If anyone ever played any of his songs at a party, he’d threaten to walk out. The guests he and Jilly picked would almost always include a few comedians who opened for him at his shows, such as Tom Dreesen, who cracked me up, and Don “Bullethead” Rickles, whom Frank first met when Don’s mother, Etta, persuaded Frank’s mother, Dolly, to give her son a break. Frank went along to see Rickles perform as Dolly and Etta had asked, but he sat hidden behind a newspaper for the entire show. He and Rickles got along famously after that. Then there were the natural comics like Dean Martin and Jimmy Van Heusen, both of whom Frank had a great bond with chiefly through their shared love of humor. Dean, the man Frank called “Drunkie,” was hysterical; they were like a double act bouncing off each other. They’d find someone to pick on like Sammy Davis or James Stewart and go to work. Jimmy Stewart was adorable and would take it all in good sport as the two of them mimicked how he stammered—“Er, er, er, w-e-ell, Frank.”

  He’d come right back at them with “Er, er, er, w-e-ell what do you mean? Do you think I t-t-talk like that?”

  Jimmy Van Heusen knew Frank from when they’d both worked with the Tommy Dorsey band in the 1930s and used to hang out at a bar in New York called Toots Shor’s. Jimmy was christened Edward Chester Babcock, a name he knew he’d have to change if he wanted to be successful. Jimmy Stewart was his all-time hero, and he thought the billboard advertisement for Van Heusen shirts was elegant, so he made up his name using something from each. People were always after Frank to change his name in the early days because no one had ever heard of the Sicilian name Sinatra, but after experimenting with a couple of surnames, he rejected them. “My name is Frank Sinatra,” he told them, “and it’s going to stay Frank Sinatra.”

  Jimmy was a sweet, sweet guy
. As Chester Babcock, he used to flick through the phone book and call up complete strangers. “Hello, are you a Cock?” he’d ask. “I’m a Cock too.” He stayed in touch with one woman named Elsa Cock for years. He first found her name in a phone book somewhere in Europe when he was on the road with Frank. Never bothering about international time zones, he’d call Elsa at all hours of the day and night just to say hello, often putting “my friend Frank” on the line for fun. I don’t think she ever really knew who those two idiots were.

  Frank and Jimmy were crazy enough individually, but together they were impossible. Loaded, they’d fly to Vegas late at night in Jimmy’s single-engine plane with only a hot water bottle to pee into. Or they’d swoop low over the Salton Sea Club with Jimmy hanging on to Frank’s belt as he leaned out of the plane to take photographs of a race. They didn’t have lights at the Palm Springs airport in the early days, so if Frank and Jimmy came in at night, they’d have Jilly waiting on the runway flashing his car headlights on and off so they could see. I don’t know how they survived.

  One day, Frank and Jimmy were sitting by the pool at the Compound when they heard footsteps padding across the roof of the pool house. Frank had round-the-clock security because of all the fans who would climb fences to try to get in to see him. Vine Joubert, Frank’s inimitable housekeeper (who was like a mother to him and loved him just as fiercely), would sometimes have to shoo complete strangers out of the house after they’d scaled the perimeter fence. So Frank wasn’t altogether surprised to see someone he didn’t know peering down at him from above. Jimmy and he took one look at each other, pulled the guy off the roof, dragged him to the swimming pool, and threw him in. Jimmy cried, “I’ll drown the son of a bitch!” Every time the poor man came up for air, they’d push him down again.

  Eventually, their victim pulled out a soggy sheet of paper and spluttered, “Hey, wait! I wrote a song … I have a song here … All I want is to play it for you!” Dripping wet, he pleaded, “Won’t you just listen to it, Mr. Sinatra?” Frank was constantly inundated with similar requests—through the mail, left in his hotel room, his car, and his laundry—and although he listened to hundreds of tunes “just in case,” the majority of them were no good, and he couldn’t face listening to another dud. He called security and had the would-be songwriter thrown off the property.