Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [161]
From that moment on, I soured on the Foothill house I’d once fallen in love with. Suddenly, I didn’t want to live there anymore. It was too big. I felt too vulnerable living there alone, and without Frank, there didn’t seem much point. I felt like a change anyway. I needed to close some old doors and open some new ones. There were too many memories there for me to handle. Not long after the mugging, I put that house on the market and bought an apartment in Westwood, where I am very happy. It has great security, so I feel safe and protected. Around the same time, I decided that it would be nice to go back to Palm Springs for the winters.
To begin with, I rented the old Fred Wilson house in Thunderbird Heights, which was wonderful and had a tennis court but was too big for a place I was only going to use two or three months a year. I knew I needed to find something smaller and more practical. Frank and I had watched a condominium being built right across the street from where we used to live. I’d always teased him, saying, “Whichever one of us goes first, I’m going to have a place there.” The house I chose had plenty of space to hang Frank’s art and entertain friends. Better still, the children’s center was a five-minute drive away. Having given up our place in New York, I decided to divide my year equally between the beach, the desert, and the city, a routine I’ve been keeping up ever since.
Surprisingly, the year I lost Frank ended up being a very good year. To my delight, Bobby married his bride in June in a private ceremony in New York. He was forty-seven years old, so I guessed he must have really listened to me in Neuchâtel all those years earlier when I’d told him not to marry too young.
Then on December 19, 1998, my first grandchild—Carina Blakeley Marx—was born. I couldn’t help but think of her as a gift from above. Just as I was mourning the passing of the man I’d loved more than anything in the world, a new life was created, reminding me of the wonderful continuity of things. Carina is a treasure who continues to surprise and delight me as she grows into a beautiful young girl with a mind of her own. Frank would have been so enormously proud.
Feeling broody, I acquired my own new baby—a handsome Cavalier King Charles spaniel who goes by the name of Sir Winston Sinatra. He is my constant companion and my closest friend. A reminder of happier days with Miss Wiggles and Caroline, he brings me great joy. As with darling Carina, I only wish Frank could have known him, but then I think that maybe he does. I have never been one to dwell on the idea of an afterlife, but something happened after Frank died that did make me wonder. My friend Kathy Hilton (mother of Paris and Nicky) called me up one day after she’d been to see a psychic. The medium apparently told her that Frank had a message for me, which was to “look for the hummingbird” whenever I needed a sign. I was quite taken aback by what she said because only the previous day, when I had been in a quandary about some important decision, I’d asked Frank aloud to “show me a sign.” Also, Frank and I had always loved hummingbirds. We had watched a pair make a nest in a cactus right outside our bedroom window at the Compound soon after we were married. We had glowed with parental pride when the eggs hatched and the babies finally learned how to fly away from the cats waiting patiently at the bottom of the cactus.
A day or so after Kathy’s call to me, a hummingbird suddenly appeared on the terrace of my Los Angeles apartment. It remained there feeding on the flowers for several minutes as I watched. Living in the penthouse, I had never