Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [34]
I almost choked. Looking around at my companions, I couldn’t figure out why I, of all people, had been singled out. I rose from the table with as much dignity as I could muster as everyone watched in silence. I walked out of the restaurant flanked by these gorillas as my fellow club members looked on agog. It was only when I got outside that I spotted “the Singing Cop” Phil Regan laughing at me from a bush. The whole episode was a huge gag he’d set up. I could have killed that jokester.
When Jack Kennedy eventually arrived in town, his presidential motorcade swept him straight past the Compound and on to Bing Crosby’s house in Thunderbird Heights. That was a terrible loss of face for Frank. The official reason given was security—Bing’s house was said to be safer because it backed onto a mountain, whereas Frank’s house was open on four sides. (It had nothing to do with the Tamarisk ladies’ fantasies, I promise.) Frank saw Jack’s decision to stay with Republican Bing as a direct snub. He was so hurt, especially after all the trouble he’d gone to, that when his friend and JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford told him the news, he cut Peter off there and then and never spoke to him again. Holding a grudge, Italian-style, was yet another side of the elusive, enigmatic Mr. Sinatra.
I met up with Jack Kennedy again a couple of times during his visit. Even though he was married to Jacqueline by then with two small children, his friend Phil Regan, a kingpin in the Palm Springs social scene, was always trying to fix him up with someone. The two men came to the Racquet Club when I was playing tennis one day, and Phil formally introduced me. I acted like we’d never met before, and so did Jack. We saw each other every now and again after that and were perfectly civil. Jack was a devout Catholic and went to church to pray for his family almost every day in between hitting on all the girls, which I thought strange. He even started flirting with me all over again. Eventually I asked him if he remembered our days on the Queen of Bermuda. He recalled the journey to New York but apologized that he had no memory of me. I guess I was just one face among many for JFK.
It was eighteen months later, on a warm afternoon in November, when a news flash came on the car radio. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin from Dallas, Texas. Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade today,” it began. “First reports say that the president has been seriously wounded …” I had to pull the car over to the side of the road to compose myself and listen to the unfolding news. The next bulletin confirmed further reports that the president had been shot as he sat next to his wife, who’d then cradled him in her lap. Then came the dreadful news: “The president, ladies and gentlemen, is dead.” There was a long pause as the announcer fought to control his emotions. “This is the official word,” he said finally. “The president of the United States is dead.”
When I eventually reached the Racquet Club and wandered, dazed, into the lounge, the atmosphere was like a morgue. Nobody knew what to say or do. People wept openly. Many were gathered around radios and a television set, which was flashing images of the scene in downtown Dallas. I couldn’t bear to look. Slumping into a chair, I could hardly believe that we’d lost the man so many saw as America’s knight in shining armor. All normal life seemed to stop as the realization sank in that the Kennedy dream and its promise of a better future were over.
Frank Sinatra was devastated by the assassination of JFK, whom he described as “the brightest star in our lives.” As he had when Marilyn Monroe died the previous year, he mourned by locking himself alone in a room for days at a time. He was quoted around that time as saying, “I’m for whatever gets you through the night—be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.” I’m sure he needed all three when his nineteen-year-old son Frankie, also a singer, was kidnapped in Lake Tahoe the following month.