Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [27]
For my part, I tried to embrace his Palm Springs life as much as I could and enrolled in golf and tennis lessons. With practice and the best teacher—Zeppo—I became a good gin rummy player. My golf playing, however, infuriated him. “You’re lousy,” he’d tell me. “I never want to team up with you again! I’ve been playing this course for years, yet whenever I’m with you I see corners of it I didn’t even know existed.” He wanted me to concentrate on my golf, but tennis was more fun with a younger set and I wasn’t about to give that up. I’d become friends with several members of the Racquet Club who were closer to my age, including Hollywood’s golden couple—the actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh—as well as the singer Dinah Shore.
Dinah was one of the greatest ladies in the world, and we had so many laughs together. She looked like Miss Apple Pie Goody Two-shoes but had a wicked sense of humor and loved to party. Each summer in Palm Springs, when the clubhouse was closed and everyone had left, Dinah and I would don bikinis, go out onto the golf course barefoot, and play golf. It was so hot that we’d hit one ball, then run into the backyards of our friends’ empty houses and jump into their pools to cool off. We’d always leave our left hands out of the water with our golfing gloves on. By the time we got back to the ball, we’d be dry.
Janet Leigh was a great gal too, a terrific lady on and off the tennis court. When I first met her, she’d just won the Golden Globe for her role in Hitchcock’s Psycho and been nominated for an Oscar. Despite her enormous presence on-screen, she was so thin she could hardly control her two Great Danes, who’d come lumbering up and lick us all over. Her husband was a drop-dead handsome guy. Such a charmer and extremely flirtatious, Tony Curtis had a strong Bronx accent, and in one movie he had to say the line “Yonder lies the castle of my father,” but instead he said, “Yonder lies the castle of me fodder.” We’d rib him mercilessly about that. He was a great storyteller and would regale us with the tale of the time he made his first movie, in 1948, with the screen siren Yvonne De Carlo. Afterward, he had a limousine driver take him to his old neighborhood, where all his buddies still knew him as Bernie Schwartz. Hearing them call out hellos and ask him about life in Hollywood, Tony rolled down the window and shouted, “I fucked Yvonne De Carlo!”
Everyone was on diets in Palm Springs, and from the day I’d enrolled at the modeling school in Long Beach I’d wanted to lose two pounds. I drove my friends crazy. Eventually, a girlfriend named Louise Steinberg told me, “I wish you’d lose those fucking two pounds—I’m fed up with hearing about it!” There were all sorts of fad diets around then, just as there are now. I lived on nothing but shrimp cocktail for a while, and that seemed to work. When Tony Curtis told me he was on a new regime, I was curious. A few days later I saw him in the clubhouse eating a huge banana split with ice cream and nuts piled on top.
“Tony!” I cried. “What happened to your diet?”
He looked down at his bowl and said, “This is it.” Needless to say, it didn’t work.
Marilyn Monroe, Tony’s lover when they’d starred together in Some Like It Hot, came to the Racquet Club a couple of times when Frank Sinatra was in town. When my son, Bobby, heard that the woman of his boyhood dreams was Frank’s guest somewhere just beyond the hedge, his eyes virtually came out on stalks. Tired of his talking about her, I finally said, “Well, walk on over there and say hello.” To his credit, he did, and Frank introduced him to Marilyn, although I think Bobby was so tongue-tied he could hardly say a word. I heard later that the blond bombshell liked to walk around in the nude, but I never asked my son if that was the reason he came home so red-faced.
I saw Marilyn at the club a couple of times, and she was certainly very beautiful with a voluptuous figure. I could see why she’d attract the likes of Mr.