His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [264]
Although Frank had expected to hear the worst, he could not quite accept the fact that his mother had not somehow managed to survive. She had been the most important person in his life, the one most responsible for his incredible success. It was her temperament that had shaped Frank and her ambitions that had fueled him.
He closeted himself with his grief. No one, not even his wife or children, could reach him. Months later, he said, “Her death was a shame, a blow. Especially because of the manner in which she died. She was a woman who flew maybe five times a year. I could understand if it happened to me.”
Frank buried his mother with a requiem mass at St. Louis Roman Catholic Church in nearby Cathedral City, where she had prayed every Sunday; he laid her to rest alongside his father in Desert Memorial Park. Carrying the coffin were Jimmy Van Heusen, Dean Martin, Leo Durocher, Pat Henry, and Jilly Rizzo.
“My father was devastated by his mother’s death,” said Frank, Jr. “The days after were the worst I had known. He said nothing for hours at a time, and all of us who were nearby felt helpless to find any way to ease his agony.… Back at home after the terrible hour at graveside, I felt it best not to leave him alone. Sitting with him and watching the tears roll one by one down his face made me feel even more desolate than I had on the night the kidnappers dragged me out into the snow half-dressed.”
“The death of Frank’s mother was a trying and difficult time for Frank,” said Barbara. “It’s the only time I have seen him that sad.”
“This was the first time Frank broke down in public,” said his mother-in-law, Irene Blakeley.
Abashed by his public tears, Frank later was asked if he cried alone, and said, “Well, I don’t do that. I haven’t done that in a long time, except for recent grief, but pretty much alone. I would think so. It’s a kind of a—it’s a personal and an embarrassing moment, I think, particularly in a man, you know.”
Frank turned to his long-neglected religion for reassurance, clinging to the Catholic priests who had been so much a part of his mother’s life. Her death seemed to bring him painfully in touch with his own mortality, and, as if in atonement, he began inching his way back to the church. Soon he decided that he wanted to return to the sacraments and to remarry his Protestant wife of six months in front of a Catholic priest. To do that, though, she would have to take instruction, and he would have to obtain an annulment of his first marriage, which had taken place in Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City. There was no need to annul the marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow because those had not been performed in the Catholic church and therefore were not recognized as valid. Only the 1939 marriage to Nancy Barbato—the marriage that had produced his three children—counted in the eyes of the church. Consummation of a marriage no longer precluded an annulment. The revised Code of Canon Law would make it easy for him to dissolve that first marriage, and Barbara readily agreed to do whatever was necessary to qualify as a Catholic.
“Let me tell you that after his mother died, Frank became a totally committed Catholic, and Barbara then took instruction to convert,” said Richard Condon. “I remember one evening we were having dinner at ‘21’ in New York at a big round table, and I was with Barbara. Somehow we got to talking about her difficulty in understanding what the priest was teaching her about being in a state of grace. Now, I resigned from the Catholics when I was thirteen, but I still remembered the theory well, and we spent forty minutes at the table talking about a state of grace. I have no reason to believe in the month I spent in Spain with Frank [during the making of The Pride and the Passion in 1956]