Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [41]
Frank and Jimmy were crazy enough individually, but together they were impossible. Loaded, they’d fly to Vegas late at night in Jimmy’s single-engine plane with only a hot water bottle to pee into. Or they’d swoop low over the Salton Sea Club with Jimmy hanging on to Frank’s belt as he leaned out of the plane to take photographs of a race. They didn’t have lights at the Palm Springs airport in the early days, so if Frank and Jimmy came in at night, they’d have Jilly waiting on the runway flashing his car headlights on and off so they could see. I don’t know how they survived.
One day, Frank and Jimmy were sitting by the pool at the Compound when they heard footsteps padding across the roof of the pool house. Frank had round-the-clock security because of all the fans who would climb fences to try to get in to see him. Vine Joubert, Frank’s inimitable housekeeper (who was like a mother to him and loved him just as fiercely), would sometimes have to shoo complete strangers out of the house after they’d scaled the perimeter fence. So Frank wasn’t altogether surprised to see someone he didn’t know peering down at him from above. Jimmy and he took one look at each other, pulled the guy off the roof, dragged him to the swimming pool, and threw him in. Jimmy cried, “I’ll drown the son of a bitch!” Every time the poor man came up for air, they’d push him down again.
Eventually, their victim pulled out a soggy sheet of paper and spluttered, “Hey, wait! I wrote a song … I have a song here … All I want is to play it for you!” Dripping wet, he pleaded, “Won’t you just listen to it, Mr. Sinatra?” Frank was constantly inundated with similar requests—through the mail, left in his hotel room, his car, and his laundry—and although he listened to hundreds of tunes “just in case,” the majority of them were no good, and he couldn’t face listening to another dud. He called security and had the would-be songwriter thrown off the property.
Frank had so many people stay with him at the Compound. Tony Bennett, who Frank always said was “the best singer in the business,” came once with his girlfriend of the time, Peggy Lee. Ella Fitzgerald was a guest. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton came too, during their most tempestuous phase, in the late sixties. They drank too much and argued all the time in front of people; it was like the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which they’d pretty much played themselves. One day I came in off the tennis court and found them sitting by the pool. As I walked past, Richard turned to Frank and said, “Wow! Those are some legs on that girl!”
Elizabeth, who was coming to the end of her Hollywood heyday, looked up and complained, “I suppose my legs are terrible?”
“They’re stubby,” Richard replied, taking a slug from his whiskey, “and so are your fingers.”
Furious, she jumped up and rounded on him. “Then I want the biggest fucking diamond ever to go on my stubby fingers!” she cried. In due course, Richard did just as he was told and bought her the sixty-nine-carat “Taylor-Burton” diamond for over a million dollars from Cartier. Frank always said that was my fault.
Whenever it was too hot to stay in the desert, Frank would relocate to Villa Maggio in Pinyon Crest, the house he’d named after his character in From Here to Eternity. The property was an Alpine chalet four thousand feet above sea level and an hour’s drive from anywhere. It was surrounded by a wilderness full of coyotes and snakes.
Up there playing gin, playing tennis, or lying by the pool, Frank began to quiz me about my life before Zeppo. When I told him that I’d been a showgirl at the Riviera, he asked, “How come I didn’t meet you in Vegas then? Didn’t you come to any of my shows?”
“I was too busy working,” I replied. “Anyway, I did