Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [33]
“Well, bring them along!” Zeppo suggested brightly. “Palm Springs is a beautiful place, and I’ll buy everybody lunch.” Sure enough, Mr. Tonini put the organ, his wife, and his five children in his station wagon and drove to the desert. When Zep saw all those kids, he made me take them straight to a table at Tamarisk while he went to the bar and stayed there. I sat with them, longing for some other company. Then I spotted Groucho. “Oh, look!” I cried. “There’s Groucho Marx. Wouldn’t you like to meet him?” The couple were big Marx Brothers fans, so I motioned over a reluctant Groucho. “This is Mr. and Mrs. Tonini,” I announced happily, “and these are all the little Toninis.”
Groucho scowled and asked, “Are these all yours?”
“Yes,” the shop owner replied proudly.
“Been doing a lot of fucking, haven’t you?” Groucho commented before walking away.
The indignant couple jumped up, grabbed their kids, and made for the door without finishing their lunch. Following them out apologetically, I spotted Harpo walking into the club. “Oh, there’s Harpo!” I cried with relief. “He adores children. Surely you’d like to meet him?” The Tonini family fled from me as if I had an infectious disease.
One event in March 1962 that sent ripples around Palm Springs was the news that John F. Kennedy, the good-looking young politician who’d flirted with me on an ocean liner many years before, was coming to town.
“JFK,” as he was now known, had been in Palm Springs two years earlier, immediately before his election as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. As Frank Sinatra had rallied his showbiz friends to support “the Jack Pack,” the president naturally stayed at the home of his staunchest supporter. Frank had a bronze plaque screwed to his guest room door that proudly read: JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE, NOVEMBER 6 AND 7, 1960. Everyone, especially Frank, assumed Jack would stay with him again.
Eager to make his guests feel welcome, Frank spent thousands of dollars renovating his home. Even though he’d only just finished filming The Manchurian Candidate with Janet Leigh and was briefly engaged to the actress Juliet Prowse (about when some comedian claimed Frank had “longer engagements in Vegas”), he somehow found the time to arrange the building of a new guesthouse, a helicopter pad, and separate accommodations for the Secret Service. He even had a red telephone installed as a direct hotline to the White House. Frank’s builders were instructed to work around the clock, seven days a week, to finish in time for the presidential visit.
Jack Kennedy had become like a modern-day pop star, and everyone, especially my Palm Springs girlfriends, wanted to catch a glimpse of him. “I’m going to plaster myself into the walls of the new Sinatra guesthouse and come bursting out when JFK’s in there alone!” declared one of our friends over a tennis lunch at the Racquet Club. Another proclaimed she was going to tunnel under the fairway to the Compound, while a third was going to set up a stall on the farthest green, convinced that Jack would need to buy lemonade from her in the unaccustomed heat. Never once hinting at my previous encounter with Jack in the Bahamas, I remained quietly bemused by all the fuss.
As we sat around joking about the increasingly desperate plans to get to the president, two men in dark suits suddenly marched up and flashed us their Secret Service badges. The tallest of them asked, “Which one is Mrs. Marx?” Gulping down a mouthful of my Bloody Mary, I raised my hand sheepishly. “Right,” he announced, “come with us!”
“Why? Where are you taking me?” I asked, sounding braver than I felt.
“We’ve heard about your tunnel plan and the plastering job,” one of the agents replied. “We need to interview