Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [18]
THREE
I’m a proud mother with my new son, Bobby, and
my mother-in-law, Marge Oliver.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Luck Be a Lady
“Hey, blondie—come on in here!” The greeting was casual, slurred even. The man yelling at me through the smoky half-light had his back to the bar, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Standing around him was a group of equally well-dressed companions in tuxedos, their bow ties hanging limply at their collars. I recognized a couple of the faces.
“Keep walking,” I said to Ida and Penny. It was four in the morning, and we were on our way home. We’d already performed two shows at the Riviera and had hurried across to the Sahara to catch the husband-and-wife singers Louis Prima and Keely Smith in their after-hours performance. I was tired. My feet hurt. My son was home in bed with his dog; the housekeeper was waiting. I wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep too.
“Don’t you know who that is?” Ida asked me with a hiss. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?” She slowed her pace as the man who’d called out to me watched me keep on walking. “Talk about a high roller!” Penny chipped in. Both girls knew what they were talking about, hooked up as they were by then with Gus Greenbaum and Sidney Weiner, two of the biggest casino bosses in town. “You should at least go and have a drink with him,” Penny added.
“No way,” I replied, smiling as the man with the tumbler kept staring. “I don’t like dealing with drunks, and anyway, Joe’s waiting.”
So I kept on walking that night. I walked as fast as my aching feet could carry me past that dimly lit bar—past Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford—all of them. And past the forty-two-year-old Frank Sinatra too, in spite of his calls to me, the only blonde in our trio.
Frank may once have been the idol of my Wichita teens, but his personal life (or as much as I knew about it from the newspapers) was not a pretty picture. He’d sent shivers down my spine for his Oscar-winning performance as Private Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity, but he wasn’t someone I thought I’d care to know. His latest hit, “You’re Sensational,” from the movie High Society starring Grace Kelly, was being played on every radio across the nation, but that incredible voice alone wasn’t enough to tempt me in. His self-styled “Summit of Cool,” featuring the men alongside him who’d later become known as the Rat Pack, may have been the hippest set in town, but it was not the pack for me. Frank looked sexy that night, but I had other cards to play. It would be some time before I’d come to know just how sexy and dangerous he could be.
After I’d spent less than a year in Vegas, “Sin City” began to lose its shine, and so, sadly, did my relationship with Joe. He lost his job, and I became the main breadwinner, paying all the bills as well as half his alimony and child support. Money problems soured our once-beautiful romance. His world had changed. Rock ’n’ roll was here to stay, and his smooth style and slick presentation weren’t in vogue anymore. Unemployed and confused, he was short of cash, and we fought constantly.
In truth, we could never have sustained such a surreal, nocturnal existence. Each night we dressed up and plastered on makeup before going to work in places with no windows or clocks. We grabbed meals at all sorts of strange hours and snatched sleep whenever we could, scratching out a living along with so many others. Missing his own son and jealous that I was spending time with mine, Joe had never been keen to have Bobby around, and it began to show.
Even Boots the dog didn’t seem happy in our first-floor apartment. Bobby wasn’t having a great time either.