Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [120]
“Oh, that would be heaven,” I cried. “Thank you!” He jumped up and turned on the log-effect fire a few feet behind me. I could feel the heat of the gas flames immediately and was incredibly grateful. As he came back, I began to thank him again when I was interrupted from farther down the table.
“Turn it orf!” Princess Margaret said sharply.
“But Mrs. Sinatra has a chill,” my companion countered.
“I said turn it orf!”
“Oh my!” he replied. He stood up, got down on his hands and knees, and switched off the one flicker of heat in the room. As he sat back down next to me, he sighed. “Well, that’s another five years we won’t be speaking!”
Frank’s London performance made more money for the princess’s charity than it had made in its entire history. Thoughtfully, he had booked the royal box for me, but when we got there I discovered that we were sharing it with Princess Margaret’s children, who’d been told at the last minute that they could sit there too. I was a bit teed off because the box had been especially reserved for me and my friends, including Swifty Lazar, Judy Green, Leonora Hornblow, and Ann Downey, but I didn’t want to tell their royal highnesses to leave. Princess Margaret, who had a crush on Frank, invited us to Annabel’s nightclub after the show for dinner in a private room. By the time we got there, after an evening squashed into the royal box, I was even more teed off and probably a little loaded too. After another drink at the bar, I suddenly announced to Swifty, “I’m not going to her party.”
He took one look at me and nodded. “Okay then, we’ll have our own.”
Frank walked in at that moment, took one look at my face, and said, “What’s wrong?”
Pulling “a Frank” on him, I replied, “Princess Margaret is waiting in the back room for you, but I’ve decided that I’m not going.”
He asked me why, so I told him, adding, “Swifty and I are going to throw our own party back at the hotel. It’ll be much more fun.” Frank agreed, so we walked out of the nightclub, leaving the sister of the Queen of England waiting for the guests who never showed. In effect, I turned her party “orf.”
The year Frank was seventy was spent on the road as usual, promoting his latest album, L.A. Is My Lady, which he made with the inimitable Quincy Jones. The tour culminated in a concert in the southern states, followed by a private dinner for friends and family. At a time when most people might have considered taking it easy, my husband was still pushing himself, still performing and still delighting his fans—and me. He really loved what he did for a living and often said, “The worst thing you could tell me is that I couldn’t work anymore.”
I told Jimmy Stewart that one night, and he knew what Frank meant exactly. “That’s just the way I am too!” he said. “I never want to quit. I’ll do commercials; I’ll do anything, but I need to work.” Jimmy, whose parents had owned a hardware store in Pennsylvania similar to Blakeley’s and who grew up during the Depression, added, “Coming from a poor background, you always fear you might lose it.” Bless him, that kind, modest man was a multimillionaire thanks to his shrewd investments, but he did work right into his eighties, and yes, he even did commercials. Anything, as long as it was work.
It hardly seemed possible that Frank was really seventy. As he would say, “That’s a lot of bourbon under the bridge, baby.” He’d lost so many great friends along the way—Don Costa, Jack and Mary Benny, Nelson Riddle, Yul Brynner, Count Basie, Orson Welles, and Pat Henry most recently—but he was in good health, although the doctors