Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [156]
The rest of that night is a blur. There’d been no time. Not to call anyone. Not even to say good-bye. I can’t now remember how I got home or who called Bobby and Frank’s family for me. Vine probably. Maybe I did. Suddenly, our house was full of people. There was Bee Korshak, George and Jolene Schlatter, Steve and Eydie. Our road and driveway were floodlit as the media gathered. Someone told me that on the news of Frank’s passing, the lights had been dimmed in Vegas and at the Helmsley Hotel in New York. The Empire State Building was bathed in hues of blue, and the tower of Capitol Records was to be draped in a black shroud. Blue cocktails were served in bars around the world, and at every address from Hoboken to Palm Springs that held some significance to Sinatra, fans stood vigil with flickering candles.
Everyone kept telling me that they didn’t want me to be alone. Well, it was too late for that. With Frank gone from my life, a part of me would always be alone. People tried to reassure me that time would heal my wounds. Most were kind, although some arrived just to take what they could of his, but I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Nothing was important to me. Nothing. All I could think about were Frank’s final words—“I can’t.” For the last year of his life, I’d been fighting to keep him alive, keep him with me. That’s all I could dwell on as the minutes crawled by that longest of nights.
In the first twenty-four hours after he died, all I wanted to do was what Frank had done in times of grief—curl up somewhere in a corner and block out the rest of the world. But his was no ordinary passing. This was the death of an icon, of someone everyone felt they knew and deserved a piece of. The doorbell never stopped ringing as baskets, wreaths, sacks of mail, and other tributes cascaded into our home. We had so many bouquets we had to lay them on the floor, through the hall, up the stairs, out in the backyard. I sent half of them to the local children’s hospital and the rest to Cedars-Sinai, where they lined the corridors and little old ladies shuffled out of their bedrooms to admire the flowers that “Frank sent.”
Our street was virtually closed because of the media vans and the vehicles of individuals who flocked into Beverly Hills. A huge crowd gathered outside the gates, many dressed in the kinds of suits and hats that Frank used to wear. Peering out of an upstairs window, I realized that if ever I’d hoped for a small, private ceremony for my husband in the desert church we both adored, I was being naïve. Frank was a megastar. I knew I’d be sharing him with his public from the day we’d started seeing each other. I’d never minded until now; he’d earned all that love, and he deserved it. His farewell could be nothing less than an event, his final performance watched by millions around the world. Akin to a state funeral, it would be televised and closely scrutinized. There would be no quiet corners in which to weep.
Drawing on all my reserves and remembering that, as Mrs. Frank Sinatra, I had to remain dignified, stoic, and do everything in my power to keep my husband’s legacy alive, I set about arranging what I hoped would be a fitting tribute to the man I dearly loved and already missed so dreadfully. I soon discovered that arranging such a funeral would be a huge undertaking, strewn with pitfalls. Everyone who was anyone expected an invite, and I—as the gatekeeper—had to say yes or no. The former employee of Frank’s whom he’d fired pleaded with me to be allowed to come. He even had his wife go to work on me in tears, which was when I finally cracked. Then there were his two surviving ex-wives to be considered, along with the wishes of his family and the expectations of friends in show business, industry, and politics. Because of the overwhelming number of people who wanted to attend, we had to make it invitation only and arrange for tickets to be issued at a special box office, as if this were his last concert.
As well as trying not to upset anyone and staying true to what Frank would have wanted, I had to organize