Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [22]
My modeling school was being closed, and my services weren’t required. Before too long I was broke, all my savings gone. Neither Marge Oliver nor my parents could help, and I had no idea what to do. One day Zeppo called to see how I was. When I told him the truth, he made me an offer. “Come to Palm Springs,” he pleaded. “I’ll set you and Bobby up in your own place. You can commute back to L.A. to model whenever you want.” With all other options running out, I had little choice but to accept.
I fell in love with Palm Springs during the winter of 1958, but not with Zeppo Marx. At least not enough to marry him then, which was what he really wanted, but I was off marriage for good. “The Springs” was a little desert town with a tremendous sense of style and glamour. Those who lived there behaved as if they were permanently on vacation, which I guess they kind of were. Zeppo rented me a two-bedroom apartment in a motel next to the famous Racquet Club, where I quickly found work modeling in the poolside fashion shows. The clothes were divine and the work not remotely as frenetic as Vegas had been.
Zeppo’s house on Halper Lake Drive in the Rancho Mirage district was one of the first built just off the fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club. A dramatic, modern three-bedroom building in white tile and stucco, it stood alone overlooking the second green. Along with almost every high roller in town, Zeppo was a member of Tamarisk, which had been set up by the Jewish community for Jews. The rival club, Thunderbird, was for Gentiles, including members Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. At Tamarisk, Zeppo played golf with his friends and his brothers Chico and Gummo. Wonderfully secluded, his home nestled in citrus trees and oleander bushes with a fifty-yard lawn. Beyond a topiary garden and a high privet hedge, in what was known as the Compound, lived his neighbor Frank Sinatra.
The two men had known each other for years; Frank and Groucho even appeared in a movie together in 1951. The first time Zeppo walked me around his backyard he told me, “Frank’s never around much. He’s always working or on the road.” I glanced across the seventeenth fairway at the hedge that separated the two properties and thought that, given Frank’s reputation as a late-night-party thrower, that was probably a blessing.
Bobby and I tried to settle into our new life, but it wasn’t as easy a transition as I’d hoped. Zeppo gave me such a hard time about having my son with me that, realizing I had no wriggle room, I found a good but expensive military school near the ocean in Long Beach. Zeppo agreed to pay all Bobby’s tuition fees and expenses; anything to get rid of him. Although Bobby would board all week, I could still visit him every weekend and take him out. My resilient son, who’d been bounced around so much of his life already, adjusted to the Southern California Military Academy amazingly well. After a few visits, I discovered why. My lanky boy had been selling or bartering my stash of glossy eight-by-ten modeling shots, in which I was posed in anything from ball gowns to swimsuits. In return, his pubescent fellow pupils gave him sweets, polished his shoes, or made his bed. I was the school pinup! Whenever I went to visit, boys would rush up and ask me to sign photographs. I was so relieved that Bobby had found a way to make friends, even if it was cheeky. Promoted to master sergeant, he looked so dashing and handsome in his braid and brass buttons that I couldn’t wait to show him off at the Racquet Club. I even commissioned an oil painting of him in his uniform, which still hangs in my bedroom today.
Alone in Palm Springs with Zeppo, I soon realized that I’d only swapped one surreal existence for another. Being a “desert rat” took some getting used to, especially after Vegas. Most “rats” played golf early in the morning, when it was cool, followed by lunch, a round of tennis, and a game of gin rummy before cocktails and dinner. I didn’t play golf, tennis, or gin, so—if I wasn’t modeling—I sunbathed and swam, went horseback riding in the desert,