Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [149]
Speeding home in the back of the limo, I could barely speak. Finally, I squeezed his hand and asked him, “When are you going to learn to swing?”
Later that year, Frank celebrated his eightieth birthday. We’d been married for nineteen years, yet it seemed like only yesterday that my darling husband-to-be had called me the morning of our wedding to tell me he couldn’t wait for me to be his bride. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to mark his milestone birthday. Everyone, that is, except Frank. I thought it would be nice to do something special, but I was thinking more of a quiet dinner with friends, which is exactly what we had when George and Jolene threw us an intimate dinner at their house with the Pecks and the Douglases. FS wasn’t going to be allowed to get away with just that, though. The Empire State Building was bathed in blue light for Ol’ Blue Eyes’s birthday, and plans had been afoot for months for an all-star televised tribute—Frank Sinatra: 80 Years My Way. With all proceeds being shared between the children’s center and a Los Angeles AIDS charity, stars of screen and stage would perform, including Bruce Springsteen, Tony Bennett, Bono, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Greg Peck, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Little Richard, Roseanne, Vic Damone, Angela Lansbury, Patti LaBelle, Tom Selleck, and Natalie Cole, among many others who stepped up at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. George was executive producer in charge of the special, which he described as “a loving birthday card to Frank.”
Frank was more than a little nervous about the show. He wasn’t feeling well, and he didn’t know if he wanted to have cameras zooming in on him. I knew that if I could just get him there, though, he’d love it. The night before the show was to be taped, I invited Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan to dinner to break the ice, and the three of them got on like a house on fire. Along with several others who’d be performing the next night, they drank, goofed around, and sang together at the piano. It was an incredible evening.
On the night of the show, Frank received a standing ovation just for making an entrance. He joked that it was “for still being alive.” He and I sat at a small, spotlit table ringside and watched one great star after another pay their respects. Bruce Springsteen opened the proceedings by calling Frank “the patron saint of New Jersey,” and then he sang “Angel Eyes,” the number Frank had bowed out with when he’d “retired” all those years before.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the future governor of California, spoke of Frank’s incredible fund-raising, which he estimated had netted over a billion dollars for numerous charities throughout the years. (That night alone added another million.) Ray Charles did a fabulous version of “Ol’ Man River,” and Tony Bennett sang “(He’s) Got the World on a String.” There were old movie clips and news footage showing images of Frank’s remarkable life. Bono recorded a special video singing “Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad.” There was a can-can routine by the Moulin Rouge Dancers, before Bob Dylan (who was going to sing “That’s Life” but couldn’t get along with it) sang an interesting acoustic number instead called “Restless Farewell,” which had the same sentiment as “My Way” and which Frank was visibly moved by when he heard the lyrics. The final verse goes:
So I’ll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn.
Patti LaBelle sang an incredible version of “The House I Live In,” the song Frank recorded in the sixties to defuse racial tension, and hers was the only performance that he stood to applaud. The finale, of course,