Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [35]
Over the next few years, Zeppo and I began to see more of Frank, especially when he was in Palm Springs. He was at the peak of his success—touring, making movies, performing in Vegas, and producing one hit record after another. After announcing, “As an overprivileged adult, I’d like to help underprivileged children,” he took off on a seven-nation World Tour for Children in aid of charity. He always did at least a dozen benefits for various charities every year, for which he was never paid a penny. Extraordinarily, he’d even pay the orchestra himself. A charity that might hope for a hundred thousand dollars from an event would usually net around a million for a benefit Frank gave.
When his World Tour for Children was finally over, Frank returned to the desert for the privacy and the climate he’d fallen in love with. Having broken up with the dancer Juliet Prowse, he married the twenty-one-year-old actress Mia Farrow, announcing, “Let’s say I’ve got a good five years left—why not enjoy them?” He divorced her almost as quickly. I read a rather sad quote from him after that in Life magazine that said, “If I did marry [again] it would have to be somebody out of show business, or someone who will get out of the business … All I ask is that my wife looks after me and I will see that she’s looked after.” There was such poignancy to that, I thought. Frank was still looking for love.
Then to add to his woes, his father, Marty, died. I met Marty once, at a party Frank threw at the Compound. It was a big event attended by stars like Angie Dickinson, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Yul Brynner (whom Frank called “the Chinaman”) was there too, along with the usual suspects I was coming to know, such as Frank’s best friend and bodyguard, Jilly Rizzo. Marty was a great cook, as was Frank’s mother, Dolly, who’d stay up all night making what she called the “gravy” for the pasta while Jilly (whom she referred to as Fuck Face) dipped bread into it. Marty made the best gnocchi I ever tasted. He’d cook at some of his son’s parties when he was visiting from New Jersey and then he’d sit on his own in a corner. An illiterate boilermaker and fireman from a village near Palermo, Sicily, Marty could barely write his name and hardly spoke any English, so I sat with him and asked someone who spoke Italian to interpret for me.
We got along famously as he told me about his life. Although he’d been a boxer in New Jersey under the pseudonym of Marty O’Brien, he insisted it was Dolly who was the real fighter, a woman who’d thump anyone who made a derogatory remark about Frank. He told me of the time she hit a would-be robber over the head with a blackjack and then sat on him screaming until the police arrived. As Marty spoke of the woman he’d eloped with on St. Valentine’s Day, he reminded me of my long-suffering father dealing with my willful mother. I only wished I’d picked up more Italian with Bob Oliver’s family, because I could have talked to Marty all night. Frank joined us for a while and took over the translating, and it was clear the two men adored each other. They also had a similar sense of humor. Frank told me that one of the few times his father ever saw him perform—in New York about when I was sighing over his songs back in Wichita—the screams of his fans were so loud that when Frank asked Marty what he thought of the concert, his father told him, “I couldn’t hear a fucking thing!”
Sadly, with heart problems and emphysema, Antonino Martino Sinatra went into a terminal decline at age seventy-four. Frank, who’d slept in his father’s hospital room at the end and said Marty was one of the greatest men he ever knew, was shattered by his passing. Dolly was equally devastated, and at Marty’s funeral in New Jersey, attended by thousands of Frank’s fans, she tried to throw herself into the grave.
Dolly was one tough dame. She