Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [152]
Two months later, on my seventieth birthday in March 1997, Frank was still not feeling great, so I wasn’t surprised when he announced that he didn’t feel like facing our planned dinner with a few close friends. “Won’t you even come out and say hello?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment.
“I don’t want to change out of my pajamas,” he complained.
“Okay, then. You won’t have to,” I told him before calling our guests and informing them it was to be a pajama party. When Frank was wheeled into the room, he had to smile. Everyone was dressed just like him.
Each new time he was hospitalized, the rumors would begin to fly. Tabloid newspapers made wild claims, and friends would call us from all over the world to ask tentatively, “Is Frank all right? We heard he’d died!”
“Tell them not yet,” Frank would reply gruffly if he overheard.
Sensing his slow demise, the newspapers began to prepare his obituaries and called several of our friends to ask for their tributes. The paparazzi became ever more determined to get “the final picture.” We were told that some editors had offered over a hundred thousand dollars for such a shot. I developed some cunning ways of getting Frank in and out of the hospital without being seen. If he was taken in by ambulance, I’d arrange for a sheet to be raised when he was carried out of the house to shield him from view. We had a long driveway at Foothill, but there were still angles to get a shot. My problems didn’t end there. Because Frank insisted that the ambulance siren be turned off, we’d have to stop at every red light. The photographers following us would jump off their motorbikes or run out of their cars whenever we stopped and press their cameras to the windows. So I worked out a system of fixing tinfoil to the glass. If we had time to get Frank to the hospital in one of our own vehicles, we’d use the SUV with blacked-out windows and arrive at Cedars-Sinai through a secret route to the basement. Accompanied by security guards, I’d drape a scarf over Frank’s face while he was carried upstairs on a stretcher.
Even when he was within the relative sanctuary of a hospital, where he was checked in as Albert Francis or Charlie Neat, photographers would go to extraordinary lengths to snap Frank. They’d check in with some spurious ailment just so they could walk up and down outside his room in the hope that his door might be open. We played cat and mouse with the press for a long time, and of course I couldn’t always outwit the photographers, so sometimes they’d get a shot of Frank looking frail and publish it in the cheap rags, but I kept all such photos from him. He was fighting for his life. I was fighting for his privacy. The last thing he needed when he was barely able to catch his breath was a camera in his face. That would have killed him.
Back at the beach house—the place he came to love best of all—I’d let him recover after each scare. He’d sit in the garden wrapped up in a blanket, listening to the ocean. We had a bench up on the dune under a shade, and we liked to sit there side by side and watch the pelicans flying majestically by or see the waves come crashing to the shore. It was a simple pleasure I’d never tired of since the first time I’d seen the Pacific as a starry-eyed teenager. Unfortunately, our fragile peace was increasingly shattered by helicopters buzzing overhead, with photographers hanging out the sides. Some of our neighbors, notably Dick Martin and Steve Lawrence, would drop their pants and moon the choppers. Not to be thwarted, reporters hired boats and dropped anchor a few yards off the beach, right opposite our backyard. One time we even found someone lying under our bench on the dune, his lens directed straight