His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [207]
With her long blond hair streaming down her back and her wide innocent blue eyes, she seemed pure and fresh and ingenuous. In her little smocks and tights, she was a universe away from the sequined décolletage of Jill St. John and Angie Dickinson and the hardened slickness of the rest of the women in Frank’s life. Although Mia was shrewd, ambitious, and extremely manipulative for such a young woman, she appeared naive and helpless to Frank, and he wanted to protect her, to provide for her, to pet her.
“Men had an instinctive desire to protect Mia,” said her mother. “That’s the secret.”
When Mia told Frank the story of going to the prom and not being asked to dance by any of the boys, he gulped. He told her she was beautiful, but she didn’t believe him, she said, because all her life she’d been called “Mouse … I was a skinny, runty thing,” who had suffered a bout with polio. He was moved by the bare little apartment duplex she lived in with her deaf Angora cat, Malcolm, and he wanted to shower her with luxuries, but Mia didn’t seem interested in material things. She later accepted a nine-carat diamond ring, a mink coat, and a diamond bracelet as big as a manacle, but she said she never cared about money.
She called him “Charlie Brown” for the sweet, round-faced character in the Peanuts comic strip, and he called her “doll face.” She entered his life at a time when middle-aged America was trying to be young again, to disprove the buttons and banners of the flower children proclaiming: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” He was almost fifty years old; she was nineteen.
In the beginning of their relationship, Frank and Mia spent many quiet weekends together at his house in Palm Springs. His men friends dismissed her as just another one of Frank’s “broads,” but the women knew better.
“Mia was a very clever young lady, and she knew exactly what she was about and what she wanted,” said Edie Goetz. “She was crazy about Frank, and she intended to marry him.”
“Jack and I spent a weekend with them in Palm Springs,” said Corinne Entratter, “and when I saw her standing by the mantel petting her great big white long-haired cat and being completely aloof and indifferent to everyone around her like she was on the third ring of Saturn or something, I thought, ‘Yep, Frank’s going to marry this one.’ She was just kookie enough.”
Jack Warner and his mistress, Jackie Park, also spent a weekend in Frank’s house in Palm Springs, which was still filled with photographs of Ava Gardner.
“There was one of Ava in the bathroom, in the bedroom over his bed, in the living room, and even one in the kitchen, but Mia never said a word about them,” said Jackie Park. “I told her that I had known her father and was amused when she said, ‘Oh, Daddy was so pure and holy, he should have been the pope.’ I was kind of taken aback by that one because I’d had a rollicking sexual relationship with John Farrow and I certainly didn’t remember him as pure and holy! I asked her if she was happy with Frank, and she said, ‘Yes, we’re going to get married. I just know we are. This is my destiny, and there is nothing I can do about it.’ I thought at the time that she was seeking a replacement for her dad, whom she adored.”
During these weekends in Palm Springs, Frank entertained friends like the Goetzes, Rosalind Russell and her husband, Freddie Brisson, Claudette Colbert and her husband, Dr. Joel Pressman—“that stuffy, older crowd that he cultivated to be more respectable,” said Dexter. “I called them ‘the late show.’ ” Mia tried her best to act as Frank’s hostess on these occasions, but she had not mastered all the niceties. Once, he asked her to do the seating for a dinner party, but she stumbled, trying to seat men next to women without putting them next to their wives. Embarrassed, Frank told her to sit down and did it himself. The next day, she sent him a letter apologizing for her lack of finesse,