His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [262]
The couple planned to honeymoon with three couples from New York—the Morton Downeys, the Bill Greens, the Paul Mannos—and set off the next day for Frank’s mountain chalet in Idylwild, about fifty miles from his Palm Springs compound. Frank stayed up late drinking with Bill Green that night and didn’t go to bed until four A.M., hours after Barbara was asleep. As he stood up to retire, he walked over to his friend, and cupped Green’s face in his hands.
“Bill, sometimes I wish someone would really hurt you so I could kill them,” he said. This was his way of telling his friend how much he cared for him.
Although she had been living with Frank for years, marriage opened up a whole new world to Barbara, who suddenly found new respect and attention as Mrs. Frank Sinatra. Town and Country wanted to photograph her; Charlotte Curtis, society editor of The New York Times, interviewed her; designers threw open their doors to her, knowing that Frank would shower her with clothes, jewelry, and furs.
“He’s turned every single day into Christmas,” said Barbara, who exulted in her new possessions. “It knocks me out. Maybe I appreciate it more because I didn’t always have all this.”
Frank gave his bride free rein to redecorate his Palm Springs compound. “Do what you want,” he told her. “Do it exactly the way you want it, and then I want to see it.”
With no financial restraints, Barbara started refurbishing. She commissioned a new master bedroom, new dressing rooms, new closets, and a new bathroom. She also ordered new furniture in soft shades of orange, Frank’s favorite color, and jolted the salespeople at Kreiss in Los Angeles when she made a down payment on some dust ruffles and a few pieces of wicker.
“Mrs. Sinatra opened her purse and took out ten thousand dollars in cash that still had the Caesars Palace wrapper on it,” said Bahman Rooin, a Kreiss salesman. “That was the way she made the down payment on her order.”
Embracing her husband’s life, Barbara followed Frank everywhere.
“I travel with him, that’s really our life,” she said. “We’re really on the road most of the time, and a plane is almost our home or a hotel, or whatever. … So in order to try to make some kind of normalcy out of it, out of that crazy kind of life, I travel with him and try to make it as comfortable as possible.”
Frank’s opening nights in Las Vegas were always an exciting spectacle that brought the entire Sinatra family together, with Barbara sitting ringside for every performance. Dolly especially loved the neon lights and all-night glitter of these occasions, when movie stars like Kirk Douglas and Cary Grant flew from Hollywood to be in the audience to pay homage to her son. She also enjoyed the bawdy comedians of Las Vegas, especially Don Rickles. She laughed uproariously at his insulting humor, which was not unlike her own, but if she were traveling with Sister Consilia, she refused to let the nun attend the show with her.
“He’s too off-color for you, Sister,” she said.
The smiling, gray-haired Dolly would spend hours in the cavernous casino of Caesars Palace playing the slot machines. Whenever she ran out of money, she dispatched a courier to her son, who peeled off several hundred-dollar bills so she could continue feeding the one-armed bandits. She even had a slot machine at home that she had rigged. The eighty-two-year-old matriarch was catered to at the casino, where she knew all the pit bosses and dealers and bookmakers. She relished the attention they showered on her as Mama Sinatra. She accepted it as her due.
For her son’s opening on Thursday, January 6, 1977, Dolly and her New Jersey houseguest, Anna Carbone, a doctor’s widow from Cliffside, made plans to take a chartered Learjet from Palm Springs to Las Vegas. Dolly much preferred going on her own to