Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [105]
Talk about romantic.
Without a doubt, my happiest times with Frank were spent in the company of friends at home or at play. He was never more relaxed than when he was off duty. As an ardent fan of baseball, he had boxes at the Dodger and Yankee stadiums, which were always great fun to go to, especially when Bobby joined us with whichever girlfriend he had in tow at the time. Frank and Dean Martin even started their own rival baseball teams (although I think they only ever played one game). My husband’s team, which included Bobby, Tommy Lasorda, and Pat Henry, was called Old Blue Eyes, and Dean’s was called Old Red Eyes. They started playing around three in the morning, and with the score tied at dawn, they went home. Pat said it was the only game that was stopped on account of light.
At Yankee Stadium, Frank would don a baseball cap and bomber jacket and watch the game sitting with the likes of Yogi Berra. Frank was a great friend of Joe DiMaggio, who married Marilyn Monroe, and was also friendly with O. J. Simpson. I met O. J. once at a disco with his wife, Nicole, who was adorable; it was so sad how that ended. At Dodger Stadium in L.A., Frank would go to the locker room and give a pep talk to the players. Frank would sit on the first-base side, across from Tommy Lasorda in the dugout, eating hot dogs and drinking beer. Tommy was a huge Sinatra fan and had a wall in his office crammed with photographs of Frank. Don Rickles went into that office one day and asked Tommy, “Hey, where are my photos?”
Frank didn’t much care for horseracing, which he thought was too slow, but he loved boxing, having been a featherweight fighter like his father, Marty, and his uncle Babe. Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali, both of whom I met and loved, were friends. They were sweet and soft-spoken, not at all aggressive. At the famous Ali-Holmes fight in Vegas, we were sitting so close to the ring that I ended up splattered in blood and sweat. Frank also supported Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” until the end of his days, visiting him in Vegas and ultimately paying for him to be in the care of our friend Dr. Michael DeBakey in Houston when Joe suffered a stroke.
Home was the one place Frank could completely relax, and we still had a few to choose from. Frank had gifted his remote Pinyon Crest property to a religious order as a retreat, and we’d soon give up the New York apartment. The Coldwater Canyon house was sold after I was followed home one day by two men and Frank realized that I could have been trapped by the gates with no one to help me. The house was on the edge of a deep canyon, and there wasn’t even anywhere to turn. I was saved only when I picked up the (broken) car telephone in Frank’s Rolls-Royce and pretended to call for help. It was the days before cell phones, but the antenna on the phone went up and the would-be robbers saw that and reversed back down the hill. The dilemma was where we should buy in L.A. once we moved from the canyon. After skimming through a few property listings, Frank announced, “I’m too tired to look for a house. You do it.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Give me some parameters. How much do you want me to spend?”
“Just find something you like,” he said, adding, “but not too big!” I must have viewed a dozen houses before I narrowed it down to three that he agreed to see with me. One was in the district of Holmby Hills, fabulous but enormous. He walked around the property, but there was no reaction from him at all—nothing—so we both got back into the car knowing that it wasn’t the one. Then we went to see another in the same area, on Alpine Drive. The house and eight-car garage had burned down, but it was a great location and had a lot of land. As soon as I told him, “We’d have to build,” Frank turned around and got back into the car.
I saved the best for last