Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [100]
In spite of her fun side, Grace was very religious and went to church almost every day. As they were staying with us over Easter, she got up at six o’clock on Easter Sunday morning and drove to a little church she liked in the mountains outside Palm Springs for Mass. The rest of us late risers chose to go to the St. Francis of Assisi Church in nearby La Quinta, for which Frank, Cubby Broccoli, Frank Capra, and Franco Zeffirelli had been the chief fund-raisers. We piled into a convoy of cars and arrived as the service was starting, virtually doubling the congregation. Father Blewitt, the celebrant, welcomed us in before inviting some of our guests to take part in the Mass. He announced to the congregation that the day’s readings would be by Roger Moore, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, and Tom Dreesen.
One by one, the everyday churchgoers of La Quinta began to take notice. “Isn’t that Cary Grant passing the plate?” one whispered to another in astonishment. “And who’s that over there?” Prince Albert walked up to the altar with the gifts while Rainier looked on. Frank stood up first, and then Roger did his bit, followed by Greg Peck, one of the greatest actors in the world, who gave a biblical reading worthy of Moses. As Frank always said, when Greg spoke, the earth stood still. Tom Dreesen read his passage, and then, just after he’d sat back down, Father Blewitt asked Tom if he wouldn’t mind also telling a joke. Tom was horrified, but Frank elbowed him and said, “Tommy, get up there and tell them a joke.” I worried for him, because although he always made me giggle, I wasn’t sure that was his crowd. Tom’s mind was clearly working overtime as he made his way to the lectern, but then he sang the lines as in a psalm, “I’m the priest of this church and I make two hundred dollars, but that’s not enough.” Then he sang, “I’m the bishop of this church and I make four hundred dollars, and that’s not enough.” Finally, he sang, “I’m the organist of this church and I make two thousand dollars, and there’s no business like show business.” The whole event was a scream and, without doubt, the best Easter Mass I ever attended. Father Blewitt certainly talked about it for years.
Our summers in Monaco provided us with some of the best times of our lives for many years. Having raised a great deal of money in Vegas hosting the Sinatra Magic Carpet Weekend, we decided to hold one in Monte Carlo for the Princess Grace Foundation–USA, which supports young performing artists. We charged $25,000 a head and raised well over a million dollars.
Those who bought tickets were flown into Nice and invited to parties as well as Frank’s performance at the gala and all sorts of glitzy events they couldn’t normally get into. Our friend the entrepreneur John Kluge let us use his yacht for some of the parties, and the advertising mogul Mary Wells Lawrence and her husband, Harding (CEO of Braniff Airways), hosted a lunch for our guests at which Prince Albert turned up in a speedboat. The venue was their eighteenth-century villa, Villa Fiorentina, at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.
Dear Mary, she threw another party in Frank’s honor at Villa Fiorentina one summer to which she’d invited Henry Ford and King Juan Carlos, among others. The villa was a forty-five-minute drive from Monte Carlo, and Frank hated being in cars longer than about fifteen minutes. He felt trapped in the small space, no matter how fascinating the company or interesting the scenery. It wasn’t until years later that I found out he suffered from car sickness but never admitted it. Everyone (including me) just assumed he was grumpy, and no one wanted to travel with him. Needless to say, Bobby and I got stuck with him that night, and Jilly rode separately with Don Rickles. Frank never stopped complaining the whole way along that winding coastal road. “How much farther?” he’d ask. “Can’t you go any faster?” Then, the closer we got, “I’m not going