Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [116]
Not surprisingly perhaps, from the moment we arrived in Rio we were given a rapturous reception. Having landed at the airport, we had to be flown by helicopter to a military base because of the crowds. Once we reached our hotel, our motorcade was surrounded. There were hundreds of fans, yet only a few police officers to hold them behind a small blockade. “Okay, let’s go!” Jilly yelled as we leapt from the car and ran toward the building. No sooner had we stepped a few paces than the crowd burst through the barricades and swamped us. I was behind Jilly and Frank was behind me and my face was pressed up against Jilly’s back. The screams around us were deafening. More and more people started to break through the police cordon to rush at us. I realized that if one of us stumbled, we’d be trampled to death. Reaching a bottleneck near the hotel entrance, we were pushed up against a wall as hands started tearing at our clothes. I was wearing real diamond earrings and thought, Good God! I’m going to lose everything! We were nearly killed in the crush until Jilly and the security guards finally pushed us inside.
A few days later Frank performed at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium, one of the largest football stadiums in the world. More than 175,000 people made it an event that went into the Guinness Book of Records as the largest paying audience for a single performer. I was escorted to a seat in a VIP area at the front of the stadium just a few minutes before Frank’s show began. I could feel the pressure of the audience anticipation all around me; it created a palpable sensation on my skin. It had been raining hard all day, and his thousands of fans—most without umbrellas—were soaked through from hours of waiting for their hero.
As Frank stepped onto that high center stage, the crowd exploded. I had to cover my ears to protect them from the roar. The fans who had waited a lifetime went absolutely crazy, and the waves of noise that rippled from the far end of the stadium to the stage and back again almost knocked him off his feet. Suddenly Frank looked skyward, and all of us followed his gaze. The rain had stopped. Talk about divine intervention. “Obrigado. Thank you,” Frank said to the heavens, and the crowd erupted once more. I could tell the man who’d begun his career as a saloon singer in smoky little joints in New Jersey was as overcome as I was by the outpouring of adoration. For a moment he was speechless. The orchestra played the opening bars of “The Coffee Song” with the line, “They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil …,” but few could have heard a note, except perhaps the millions watching it on television sets across Central and South America. Frank began to sing,
Way down among Brazilians
Coffee beans grow by the billions
So they’ve got to find those extra cups to fill
and the response was incredible.
I could see he was thrown. Even when the crowd settled down a bit and allowed him to go on, he was overwhelmed. So much so that when the time came to sing “Strangers in the Night,” he was completely unable to—the first time I’d ever seen that happen. He stood up there on the stage, eyes welling, as the music carried on without him. Then the most amazing thing happened. Almost every one of the 175,000 people in that arena, many of whom had learned to speak English by listening to Sinatra records, began to sing the words to him, heavily accented. “Strangers in the night, exchanging glances. Wond’ring in the night, what were the chances …” Their voices welled as one until the night air was filled with the melody. Tears slid down my face as well as down Frank’s. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I ever heard.
Eventually, Frank pulled himself together and joined in. The crowd sang with him for a while, and then they listened in return, enjoying every moment. Halfway through a number, he’d stop so he could listen to their serenade. When he