Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [42]
“Well, what happened?” Frank asked, perplexed.
“I was walking past the door with some girlfriends and you asked me to come in, but I kept on walking.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to deal with a drunk,” I told him flatly.
From the look on his face, I could tell that kind of hit him in the stomach. Frank Sinatra didn’t get too many rejections.
It was at Pinyon Crest one night that our spirited game of charades ended with his hurling the clock against the door after I’d called time. I’ll never forget the fire in Frank’s eyes and the way he looked at me. His expression was full of anger and frustration, but there was something else—desire. I think I knew then that something would happen between us someday. I just didn’t know when.
SIX
“Sinatra in Greece with Blonde”—the photo that appeared
of me when I was secretly dating Frank.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Angel Eyes
When Frank announced in March 1971 that he intended to retire from performing, he sent a shock wave around the world. Nobody could believe it. He was only fifty-five years old, and his voice was still as good as ever; in fact, many believed it had improved with age. What was he thinking?
But Frank was tired of entertaining people, especially when all they really wanted were the same old tunes he had long ago become bored by. He’d been singing since he was a teenager, and he felt burned out. He’d been divorced from Mia Farrow for three years, and his life was based firmly in Palm Springs. In his honor the city fathers renamed the street he lived on (Wonder Palms Road) Frank Sinatra Drive. Frank joked with Bob Hope that his road was thinner than the nearby Bob Hope Drive and that at cocktail time his was lit up while Bob’s was shrouded in darkness.
Most of all, Frank was having fun. He wanted nothing more than to drink with Jimmy and his friends, play games, host dinners, and travel for pleasure, not work. He’d made more than enough money; he had his own record company, Reprise, as well as a Budweiser distributorship, shares in an airline, and numerous real estate ventures. With his own film company, he was an executive at Warner Brothers and had his own building on the Goldwyn lot. All told, he had around seventy staff. The company that made Jack Daniel’s had made him a “Tennessee Squire,” and his friend Angelo Lucchesi from the company gifted him a plot of land on the site of their distillery in Lynchburg to thank him for being such a devoted ambassador. Frank hoped to go see it one day. He’d set up a medical education center in Palm Springs in his father’s name and planned on being even more philanthropic in retirement, so there was plenty to keep him occupied.
As he said in a statement issued to announce his retirement, the previous thirty years of touring and recording a hundred albums with over two thousand songs had given him “little room or opportunity for reflection, reading, self-examination, and that need which every thinking man has for a fallow period; a long pause in which to seek a better understanding of changes occurring in the world.” Tickets to his retirement concert in Los Angeles on June 13 that year sold out within hours of being released. The event was so oversubscribed that the organizers decided to spread the evening’s entertainment across three separate theaters with different acts performing in rotation and Frank moving from one to another. In typical style, he turned the night into a benefit for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, a charity close to his heart because it supported entertainers who hadn’t been as lucky as he had.
Zeppo and I were offered tickets to this memorable event, which made the cover of Life magazine, and found ourselves in prime seats at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre. We were sat near some of Frank’s closest friends, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan, governor of California. It was quite a night. There were tears in people’s eyes long