Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [38]
Not long after that, Bobby, who’d always been a straight-A student, lost interest in his studies and his grades started to drop. When he announced that he wanted to move to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, famous for the birth of psychedelic rock, I was horrified. “But, Bobby, this is your home!” I said.
Defiantly he said, “I’m going to move there and you can’t stop me.”
“But where would you live?”
“I’ll find someplace,” he declared.
This went on for days; then one morning I told him, “All right, then. I’ll take you to the bus station, give you a hundred dollars, and you can buy a ticket to San Francisco.” He hesitated briefly before packing a bag and getting into the car. We were three-quarters of the way to the bus station when he turned to me and said, “Mother, I don’t think I want to go to Haight-Ashbury after all.”
I pulled over, switched off the engine, and said, “I’m so happy you said that, Bobby, because I really want you to stay.” It was the only time I ever used tough love on him. I don’t know what I’d have done if he’d gone through with it. Once we returned home, things were a lot better. We found him a great new high school called Cate in Carpinteria, where he made some lifelong friends. That place really saved his life.
Bobby had gone through so much by the time he was a teenager, but he never threw it back at me, never. His real father was bumming around Europe trying to make movies, Joe Graydon was a distant memory, and Zeppo didn’t much care. It’s so hard to keep children grounded, but it’s amazing to me how grounded Bobby still is. Open and honest, he is a very special guy. Even now, every time I look at him I know that I did something right.
Zeppo and Bobby made up their differences in later life and became friends, for which I am truly grateful. But at that point our marriage was strained, even more so after I caught Zep red-handed with some other women. It happened when I decided to make a surprise visit to the Barbara Ann, moored at Newport Beach. As I arrived, there was a party in full swing. The boat was full of girls drinking and having a good time. Zeppo was nowhere to be seen, but I suspected he was belowdecks. A woman in a skimpy bikini came up to me and asked, “Who are you?”
I gave her a steely stare. “Well, who are you?”
“I’m the hostess of this party!” she declared triumphantly.
“I’m Mrs. Marx,” I replied. “Barbara Ann Marx?”
I watched as she shrank away to find Zeppo, but before she could, I left. Tellingly, his infidelity didn’t hurt anything other than my pride. I guess it only confirmed what I’d suspected for some time—that Zeppo was the third man in succession to let me down. I reasoned that, although our marriage was a sham, at least now we could both be honest about it. To keep me sweet, Zeppo finally took me on a promised trip to Europe with his friend the producer Harold Mirisch, who was making a movie in France. From the minute our plane landed, though, Zeppo wanted to go home. He missed playing golf, the desert climate, and his friends; he was utterly miserable. When we bumped into the Hollywood agent and his friend Swifty Lazar in a nightclub in Paris, I wanted to dance that night but Zeppo didn’t want to, nor did he want me to. The only person who had the nerve to ask me onto the dance floor was Swifty, who was so short that his famously oversize spectacles remained level with my cleavage the entire time.
We eventually cut short our grand European tour and returned home, where Zeppo reluctantly agreed to accept more invitations to events he knew I’d enjoy. Among those were the repeated requests for our company from Frank. From the late sixties, we were probably invited to the Compound or to eat out with Frank once or twice a week. We’d go to restaurants or to parties at the homes of mutual friends. We’d have