His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [209]
Mia was not ready to give up her career. “I want to go on to do good things, make good movies, do good things on the stage. Peyton Place is making it all possible. And the wonderful thing about all this is the feeling it gives you of being wanted. When you go to a party or walk into a room, everywhere, everyone looks at you differently and they treat you differently. It’s a lovely feeling.
“I want to marry Frank,” she said. “I love him, but I know if I do, my career is over and it really hasn’t even begun. I like being what I am. Wanting the career is as much a part of me as my mind and heart. If I marry, something of me will be lost and I just won’t be the same person. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us. I think I’ll wait, but. …”
In Newport, Rhode Island, as Roz Russell left the yacht, reporters swarmed around her to ask whether Frank and Mia were married yet.
“I can assure you they are not getting married here,” she said. “Not on this voyage. There is no suggestion of it.”
The yacht stopped at Hyannisport so Frank could go to the Kennedy compound and visit with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who was still unable to talk because of his stroke. Frank took Mia with him anyway, knowing that the sight of a pretty nineteen-year-old blonde would cheer the aged patriarch immensely. In Edgartown, Massachusetts, Mia and Frank refused to answer reporters’ questions about any plans for marriage. Claudette Colbert was shocked by the queries. “Good gracious, no. As far as I can determine, Mia and Frank are simply good friends,” she said. “Mia is a charming girl and Frank does like her an awful lot, but it doesn’t seem like Frank would marry such a young girl.…”
Next day’s paper carried the headline: MIA NOT MRS. YET.
At Martha’s Vineyard, tragedy befell the cruise as the yacht’s third mate drowned after heroically saving another crew member.
“Sinatra was shocked and appalled by this event, which put an end to the vacation,” said the yacht’s captain.
“It had been the most closely observed cruise since Cleopatra floated down the Nile to meet Mark Anthony,” said Time magazine.
Mia had ingratiated herself with all of Frank’s friends, from the patrician Edith Mayer Goetz to the publican Jilly Rizzo. But his family was less than enchanted, especially Nancy, Jr., who cringed every time she saw pictures of her father with the actress who was five years her junior.
Nancy and her mother were planning a celebration for Frank’s fiftieth birthday in December and had invited hundreds of people, including the President and Vice-President of the United States, who had both declined, but the two Nancys were in a quandary wondering what to do about Mia. They didn’t want to invite her, but they were afraid not to. For months, this birthday, which also commemorated Frank’s twenty-five years in show business, had been assuming the dimensions of a royal celebration, with CBS-TV News filming a special on Frank’s life to be shown in November, NBC-TV televising a Sinatra spectacular for the same month, and Billboard publishing a one-hundred-page issue entitled “The Sinatra Report.” Life magazine published a double cover with a twenty-two-page spread on Frank. It was the biggest layout accorded an entertainment figure in the magazine’s history, and Reprise Records released one of his best albums, the hauntingly beautiful September of My Years, which won a Grammy.
“It was the CBS special that started causing a few problems,” recalled Laurence Eisenberg, one of Frank’s publicists with Jim Mahoney and Associates. “Frank had insisted that Walter Cronkite not ask any personal questions and Don Hewitt, the producer, agreed that the program would show only the ‘professional’ side of Sinatra—that meant no personal questions about Mia or the Mafia. Well, there was at least one question about whether or not he planned to marry Mia and maybe a couple about some of those ‘alleged relationships.’ ”
Two weeks before the