His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [227]
Frank again called Mia and repeated his order that she walk off her movie, but she remained intractable. She went to the Factory discotheque that evening in a group that included Senator Robert F. Kennedy, with whom she danced most of the night. Reading about his wife dancing with his enemy enraged Frank as much as Mia’s refusal to obey him. Without a word to her, he called his lawyer, Mickey Rudin, and instructed him to draw up divorce papers. Then he sent Rudin to Mia’s trailer on the Paramount lot the day before Thanksgiving to serve notice on her that he was filing for divorce. Minutes later, his publicist, Jim Mahoney, announced the couple’s “trial separation.”
“We were just ready to roll when Sinatra’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, turned up,” recalled Roman Polanski. “He said he had some important papers for Mia, so I called a break.… After a few minutes, Rudin emerged [from her dressing room] and left without a word. When it was time to resume shooting, no Mia. I knocked on the door. No response. When there was no answer to my second knock, I just went in.
“There she was, sobbing her heart out. She managed, haltingly, to tell me that Rudin had come to inform her that Sinatra was starting divorce proceedings. What hurt her most was that Sinatra hadn’t deigned to tell her himself, simply sending one of his flunkies. Sending Rudin was like firing a servant. She simply couldn’t understand her husband’s contemptuous, calculated act of cruelty, and it shattered her.”
Leaving the studio in tears, Mia fled to the $300,000 English Tudor house that Frank had bought for her in Bel-Air. He had filled it with new furniture and forty-eight place settings of Gorham’s “Chantilly” silver in hopes that she might want to be a hostess instead of an actress.
“I had nothing I wanted to live for,” Mia said later. “That kind of lostness, that kind of unhappiness can be so destructive, and so bewildering.… When my marriage was over, I believed it just wasn’t possible.… You see, that marriage was terribly important to me. That promise. I believed and trusted in that commitment as I’ve never believed or trusted in a commitment before.”
Reflecting on why the “gentle, quiet man” she had married had walked out on her, she said, “Maybe it bothered him not being young. He felt things getting away from him. My friends from India would come into the house barefoot and hand him a flower. That made him feel square for the first time in his life.”
A few weeks later, Frank invited Mia to spend Christmas with him and twenty of his closest friends in Palm Springs.
“He called and asked how everything was,” she said. “Without even realizing that I was saying it, I blurted out: ‘Frank, may I come back?’ He told me that he had invited a lot of people to spend the holidays with him in Palm Springs and that if I didn’t mind a crowd, he would be happy to have me there too. I would have taken him up on the offer if the crowd had been big enough to fill the Colosseum.
“All our friends were there [the Deutsches, the Goetzes, the Brissons, the Cerfs, Harry Kurnitz, Bubbles and Arthur Hornblow, Pamela and Leland Hayward, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin], It was a fun crowd. Every night at eleven P.M., Frank had two movies just flown in from Hollywood for the guests to watch if they didn’t want to drink or play cards or talk. … I never had such a marvelous time. Frank was surrounded by the people he likes best, me included. And he was so relaxed and happy. I have never seen him so happy.”
Mia said this to a reporter shortly after her holiday with Frank in Palm Springs, but she soon realized how transitory that Christmas interlude had been when Frank never called. So she flew to the Himalayas to meditate with her guru.
“I had nothing, just the remnants of a marriage,” she said. “So I latched on to what seemed to be the nearest hope. It wasn’t just a whim; my life was crumbling, it really was. My marriage was gone.”
The trauma of divorcing his young wife hit Frank hard early in 1968 when he was