Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [117]
Because Frank was the kind of man who’d drop everything and rush to the aid of a friend in need, it was natural that Nancy Reagan should call us in March 1981 when someone tried to assassinate Ron. It was not long after Frank had produced and directed the first of Ronnie’s presidential inaugural galas and we’d both attended his seventieth birthday party.
We were asleep in Las Vegas when the telephone rang. “Ronnie’s been shot!” a distraught Nancy told Frank. “Can you come?” The would-be assassin, John Hinckley, had fired six shots as the president left a speaking engagement at a Washington hotel, seriously injuring three of his aides as well. Having lost JFK to a bullet, Frank was afraid that history was repeating itself. He canceled his performance that night and arranged an immediate flight to D.C. When we arrived at the White House, we were met by Nancy and her family plus a host of others, including Billy Graham, one of Ronnie’s closest friends. It was so strange for me to finally meet the evangelist who’d converted my mother and aunts to his particular brand of faith forty years earlier. Reverend Graham was quieter than I’d imagined him to be, soft, sweet, and warm in person and far less of the rabble-rouser I’d expected. He and Frank became Nancy’s stalwarts through that difficult time as Ronnie underwent surgery for a punctured lung. Fortunately, the president made a full recovery.
(Later that same year, the world lost Anwar Sadat to an assassin’s bullet, something that affected Frank deeply. He mourned the loss of the one he called “the single man of the desert who has stood tall in the sand begging for peace.” I could only send my heartfelt condolences to his widow, Jehan, the first lady of Egypt.)
Nancy Reagan was never a close friend, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she seemed to have a crush on my husband. After all, I was quite used to that, and if I’d wanted to I could have flirted right back with hers. What I wasn’t so accustomed to was the time and commitment she expected of Frank for the causes she and Ronnie espoused. I felt that she took a little too much advantage of Frank’s huge heart. As well as making him director of entertainment at the White House, Nancy appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and she got him involved in her Just Say No antidrugs campaign, as well as her charitable organizations for children and foster grandparents. She also invited him to the White House frequently to perform at fund-raisers and dinners. Frank was completely unfazed, of course. During long-distance telephone calls and their lunches together whenever they were in the same town, I think he became Nancy’s therapist more than her friend.
When he wasn’t busy in Washington, Frank continued to entertain his devoted fans and accepted invitations to perform at benefits and concerts around the world. He never stopped raising millions for causes including muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes, St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, the University of Nevada, and the Desert Hospital. At a benefit for the last at what was then known as the Canyon Country Club, he cooked dinner and waited tables at a $1,500-a-plate benefit before slipping into his tux to sing. As a man who had championed the careers of people like Sammy Davis, Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, and Lena Horne, Frank campaigned for civil rights long before it was fashionable. In 1945, he’d made a ten-minute film on racial intolerance aimed at teenagers and called The House I Live In, which won an Oscar. He wrote articles and addressed student rallies nationwide with passion and conviction about the importance of equality. Which is why it was a shame when he was