Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [118]
President Lucas Mangope was so indignant at the picketing and the controversy that surrounded Frank’s visit that he crowned him King of Entertainment in a tribal ceremony that took me straight back to my time with Father Rooney in Africa. My “royal” husband went on to address the Bophuthatswana Senate as I sat watching proudly, and then he became the first white man to receive the tribal homeland’s Order of the Leopard. It was just one of many awards he received in his lifetime, most of which he kept in a glass display case. Bobby was with us on that trip and hit it off right away with Eddie Mangope, the president’s son. They remained friends until Eddie’s tragic death.
Eager to do more, see more, Frank traveled as much as ever, crisscrossing our great country and the globe. As always, friends would join us every now and then, dipping in and out of the tour as it suited them, and we always enjoyed the company. One of them, Dennis Stein, came once accompanied by his fiancée, Elizabeth Taylor, whom I’d introduced him to by sitting them together at a dinner in Los Angeles. Frank and Elizabeth didn’t always see eye to eye, and the main problem between them was her lack of punctuality. My perfectionist husband had always been a stickler for timing because of his years of performing. He may have been an impatient man, but he was always professional and his impeccable sense of timing was reflected in his music. If a ticket for one of his shows stated the performance would start at 7:30 P.M., he expected to hear the orchestra strike the first note at 7:29. After so many years of people running around making sure that everything ran like clockwork, his demands were always met.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth was almost always running late. Dennis used to tell her that any event they were going to was an hour earlier than it really was in the hope of at least getting her there on time. One morning halfway through our tour, we were in our suite at the Waldorf getting ready to leave when Dennis came rushing in, clearly a nervous wreck. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Elizabeth’s in the bathtub and she doesn’t want to come out yet.”
“But our plane leaves in less than an hour!” I said.
“I don’t know what to do,” groaned Dennis.
“I do,” Frank growled. “Leave her there!” Poor Dennis, he really wanted to come with us, but his girlfriend refused to get out of the tub so we had to leave them behind.
Another time Frank was touring with the singer Pia Zadora, who came on after Don Rickles and warmed up the audience. Pia might have been born in Hoboken, but that didn’t automatically qualify her to open for Frank. Her husband, Meshulam Riklis, an Israeli businessman and Vegas casino boss, was determined to make a star of his young wife. She’d had some early success as a pop singer and a child actress, but he sent her to the best music coaches to get her properly trained. One night, as I was about to play gin rummy with Riklis, he asked me if I wanted to bet.
“Sure,” I replied.
“What do you want to play for?”
I thought about it for a moment and then replied, “Your plane.” Riklis had an even bigger plane than Frank’s, which was like an airliner.
“My plane?” he said, but then he nodded. When he lost the game, he agreed that we could use his plane for our next tour, which I was thrilled about. Hoping to save face, he challenged Frank to a game of gin, but my husband hadn’t had Zeppo Marx as a teacher. Frank agreed that, if he lost, Pia Zadora could open for him on the tour. And so it was that the little-known singer got possibly her biggest break, opening for Sinatra. She was much better than I thought she’d be, but Pia and Frank were never going to have a marriage of minds. Not least because, whenever Frank finished a show in the middle of a tight tour like the one they were on, he walked offstage and stepped