Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [57]
Having had only a few music lessons in his life, he worked out his own routine, which included swimming in the pool as part of his vocal training. Using a trick he’d learned years earlier so that he could hold key phrases for twenty-five seconds or more, he’d remain underwater for several minutes at a time to maintain his remarkable breath control. Not that I ever benefited from his breath control at home, because The Voice had never been one to sing around the house and hated to perform for friends at parties. He complained that was like “singing for his supper.” Now he worried that his “reed was rusty” because it was out of practice, but he needn’t have. The public and critical acclaim for Frank’s new album only endorsed his decision to go back on the road. One review in the New York Daily News summed it up when it said, “We thought we were through writing love letters to Frank Sinatra, but here we go again …”
In January 1974, Frank began what would turn into a massive comeback tour of the United States, Europe, the Far East, and Australia. His first concert was at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where the marquee read, HAIL SINATRA. THE NOBLEST ROMAN HAS RETURNED. As usual, Frank walked onstage without any fanfare or introduction. “If they don’t know who I am by now,” he’d say, “then they shouldn’t be here.” In what developed later that year into a series of sellout concerts that would include shows with Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie in Vegas and then on Broadway, Frank was truly back where he belonged.
His show at Caesars Palace was another milestone event, and a lot of our friends flew in just to be in the audience. Although I’d been back to Vegas a few times with Zeppo, it still felt strange for me to be in Sin City again almost two decades after my stint at the Riviera. I realized how far I’d come from the days when I’d wandered through the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel modeling pantsuits and cocktail dresses. This time, the models homed in on me as I sat having lunch or chatting with a friend. And as Vegas came alive at night, the showgirl Barbara Blakeley found herself with the highest roller of them all, strolling through casinos and nightclubs on the arm of Frank Sinatra. I couldn’t help but notice the latter-day Marshas, Idas, and Pennys ogling our every step across the pit. At the few shows I went to with Frank, I watched the chorus girls dancing their poor feet off, remembering those days so well. I applauded extra hard for the showgirls doing their balancing act with ever more elaborate headdresses.
Later that summer, we flew to Australia for the next leg of Frank’s tour. Our trip coincided with the threatened impeachment of President Nixon over the Watergate scandal, and Frank was deeply concerned for his friend. We were hardly in Australia a day or two when we had a run-in with the press. Frank didn’t like their constant demands for interviews or the tone of some of the things they wrote about us (although he kept anything like that from me). After getting trapped in the middle of a pack of pushy reporters all asking him questions and then hearing of a female journalist masquerading as me to try to get him alone, he was in fighting spirit. On one of his first appearances onstage, he laid into the press, calling them “bums, parasites, fags, and buck-and-a-half hookers.” I sat in the audience that night and thought, Oh, boy! Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Australian Journalists Association not only objected to what he’d said but claimed Frank had “insulted the nation.” One of the headlines read, OL BIG MOUTH IS BACK, and the press enlisted the support of the transportation, waiters’, and stagehands’ unions so that the next leg of Frank’s tour had to be canceled. Unable to perform, Frank made his way to Melbourne