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By Root 791 0

before the man who called himself “a saloon singer” walked onto the stage. Having just performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion alongside old friends such as Tony Bennett, George Burns, and Barbra Streisand, Frank finished up at ours. Rosalind Russell, one of his closest friends, who was sitting with us, Cary Grant, and Jack Benny had to go up and introduce him just after midnight even though Roz was in pieces. “This assignment is not a happy one for me,” she announced. “Our friend has made a decision … not one we particularly like … He’s worked long and hard for us for thirty years with his head and his voice, and especially his heart. But it’s time to put back the Kleenex and stifle the sob, for we still have the man, we still have the blue eyes; those wonderful blue eyes; that smile. For one last time we have the man, the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century.” Dear Roz had cancer by then and was giving herself frequent pain shots; I don’t know how she got through it.

Frank performed an amazing set that included all his greatest standards, such as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “All or Nothing at All,” “Ol’ Man River,” and “That’s Life.” He sang with an intensity that I’m sure echoed the emotions in his heart and received one standing ovation after another. He’d almost always closed his shows with the song “My Way,” but that night he stood in a circle of light and sang “Angel Eyes.” Holding my breath as he came to the final verse, I realized why he’d picked that song. The lyrics could have been written for him:

Try to think that love’s not around

Still it’s uncomfortably near.…

And have fun you happy people.

The drink and the laughs are on me.

While I sat wondering if this really would be the last time I’d hear Frank sing, the light shrank to a single spot on his face as he stood alone on the dark stage. Blue smoke from the cigarette he’d just lit curled around his head. “Excuse me while I disappear …,” he sang. The light faded and then cut out as he vanished between folds of velvet in the wings. In darkness, I gasped and then allowed my tears to fall as several thousand people rose to their feet as one, calling for the encore that never came. What an exit.

Back home, I tried to focus on a son who continued to delight and infuriate me in equal measure. Increasingly rebellious and with a fighting spirit I guess he must have inherited from me, Bobby was fortunately past his Haight-Ashbury phase but still knew how to push my buttons. After leaving Cate for Berkeley, he became the only white in an all-black class of over fifty pupils.

He told me: “I want to know how it feels to be black because this is what they’ve endured all these years.” He developed interests in the Black Panther political movement as well as yoga and the history of religions. Whenever I invited him for the holidays, I’d tell him, “You have to cut your hair and pull up your jeans, Bobby. I can’t take you into Tamarisk looking like that.”

One day, when he was about to go back to college, he announced, “Mother, we can never communicate again unless you read this book about racial struggle. It’s called Soul on Ice, and it was written by one of my professors, Eldridge Cleaver.”

I read a couple of chapters and thought, Ugh, but when Bobby left for Europe to spend some time with his father, I picked it up again and waded through to the end. As soon as Bobby got back, I told him triumphantly, “Guess what? We can communicate!”

“What?”

“I finished it!”

“Finished what?”

“Soul on Ice!”

Bobby shook his head and said, “Oh, Mother, that was so yesterday! I’ll send you something much better to read.” After Berkeley, he chose a college in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to study French history, literature, and philosophy for two years. He became a linguist and embraced all things European. In that picture-postcard lakeland setting, Bobby also fell in love. The girl in question was an ivory-skinned farm girl with blond hair to her waist. She was named Sylvia, and he wrote and told me he was eager for me to meet her family, which could mean only one thing.