His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [259]
As bright and shiny as the California sun, Barbara looked like a blond Ava Gardner without the layers of sensuousness—and without Ava’s fiery temperament. Calm and reassuring, she was willing to let Frank shine alone in the spotlight while she stood by his side contentedly. She was more interested in setting up tennis games, playing gin rummy, and shopping with her girlfriends than in pursuing a career. Friendly and uncomplicated, she posed no threat to Frank, nor was she someone who would make him feel intellectually inferior. Like a California sunflower, she was pretty, cheerful, and hearty enough to survive his tempers and moods.
The only drawback to the relationship was Frank’s mother, Dolly, who could not stand Barbara, and took every opportunity to tell her so. Mrs. Sinatra’s maid, Celia Pickell, who worked for her for ten years, cringed every time the two women were in the same room together.
“Dolly would say just horrid things to Barbara, and there was nothing none of us could do to stop her,” she said. “Dolly would say real loud, ‘I don’t want no whore coming into this family.’ If she had to eat at the same table with Barbara, it was awful. She’d say horrible things, and Barbara would go running from the table in tears, but there was nothing Frank could do about it. He’d say something like, ‘Aw, Mom,’ but that was it. The first wife, Nancy, was very good to Mrs. Sinatra, but Dolly never liked her either. I remember when Dolly went to the hospital in Houston, Texas, and I went down there with her. Nancy, Sr., came to see her, and Dolly said, ‘What did you come out here for? We don’t need you.’ Poor Nancy said, ‘Why do you say those things? Your son sent me to help you.’ But Dolly wouldn’t be nice. ‘Well, we don’t need your help. So go.’ Dolly spoke her mind about everything.”
Despite his mother’s objections, Frank continued seeing Barbara, though he sometimes subjected her to insults and abuse.
“In the south of France, he slapped her across the face for laughing at him, and she could not come out of her hotel room for two days,” said Gratsiella Maiellano, girlfriend of Pat DiCicco, a good friend of Frank’s. “It was in the lobby of the Hotel de Paris, and Frank told her to go to her room and shut up or else he would kill her.… We had been sitting at the pool looking at a Spanish magazine picture story of Frank, and I was translating it for everyone. He had been taken in by a girl reporter at the Marbella Club. She had fooled him and never said she was a newspaper girl. Frank took her to dinner and put his arm around her, and she sold those pictures to a magazine and wrote a story about him, how coarse he was, how sullen. She wrote that Frank was so ill-bred that he ordered a bottle of Château Lafite to be sent to the kitchen, not knowing that only the nouveau riche would do something that boorish. He was really pissed off when we started laughing. That’s when he hit Barbara and made her go to the room.”
Still, Barbara wanted to marry Frank and began pressing him to make their relationship permanent. He refused, and at the end of 1974 he ended the relationship.
“Frank had all sorts of problems deciding whether he really wanted to be married again—whether he should be married again,” said Dinah Shore.
Barbara sought refuge with her best friend, Bea Korshak, wife of the Mafia’s labor lawyer, and admitted the frustration of living with a man who refused to marry her. The Korshaks took her to dinner that evening at Gatsby’s with Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin. Barbara confided that her on-again, off-again relationship with Frank was finally off—for good.
“This time, I’m through with that bastard,” she said. “I’ve had it.”
A few days later, a watered-down version of that conversation was reported in Joyce Haber’s column in the Los Angeles Times, accompanied by a photograph of Barbara, who was incensed to see the story in print.