Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [67]
Another night when he’d been sitting up late with the boys, drinking and ranting at something, I’d locked myself in my bedroom because I didn’t want to be disturbed. Sure enough, around five in the morning Frank started beating on the door. “Who is it?” I called warily from beneath my sheets.
“Your Italian lover,” he replied. How could I not let him in after that?
My role in those early days and for all our years together was to keep everything running so that Frank could go onstage and do what he had to do. He could be a challenge, all right, but it was heaven for me to be with him even when he acted out. I was his companion, consultant, nurse, psychiatrist, and lover. The only thing I wasn’t yet was his wife.
I won’t deny that it was a test of our relationship and of my stamina, but I felt up to it even when I had concerns closer to home. Zeppo was making our divorce negotiations difficult, which made me increasingly anxious about my future. I had little or no earning potential anymore. I owned nothing other than the house Frank had gifted me and a few nice pieces of jewelry. I worried that I had no long-term security for me or for Bobby, something I seemed to have been fretting about my whole life.
One day I was out having lunch at the Bistro in Beverly Hills with Sidney Korshak, the husband of my friend Bee, when Zeppo’s attorney Greg Bautzer leaned across from an adjacent table. “Barbara,” he told me, “the only thing you’re going to get from Zeppo is the clap.” From the expression on Sidney’s face, I thought Greg was unlikely to survive the afternoon. Sidney was a powerful attorney and a formidable ally, a close friend of Frank’s. Nothing moved in the world of high finance without Sidney knowing about it, and he offered me his support from then on.
He told me, “Barbara, you have no worries. Your problems are my problems. If you need my advice about anything, you call me.” So I did. I called him from wherever I was with Frank—Chicago, New York, or Paris—telling him when I’d received another letter from Zeppo’s attorney threatening this or that. Each time Sidney would tell me, “Leave it to me, Barbara. This is nothing for you to worry about. This is my problem now.”
When the divorce was eventually settled, Zeppo agreed to pay me a fifteen-hundred-dollar monthly allowance for ten years and let me keep the 1969 Jaguar he’d given me four years earlier. Frank, not to be outdone, immediately upgraded it to the latest model. I was very grateful to Sidney for his help in the negotiations, but as we’d spoken on the telephone several times a week for almost a year, I missed talking to him. One day soon after the settlement was completed, I tracked him down to a boardroom in New York and persuaded the secretary to put me through. “Sidney!” I said long-distance. “You have another problem!”
“What now?” he replied, hoping that the legal drama was over.
“I just tried to get an appointment at the beauty shop and they say they’re fully booked. Can you help?”
There was a long pause, and then slam, the phone went down.
Even though my divorce was finalized and I was a woman of independent means, thanks in the end to Zeppo’s unexpected generosity, I was still worried about where Frank and I were heading.
The luster had undoubtedly gone from our relationship. We would fight and break up every now and then, and it wasn’t always about him not being able to commit to me or being disrespectful in some way. It was about a lot of things—usually something and nothing—as most breakups are, but it was never about other women. I didn’t own him; I had no claim on him to speak of, and I didn’t even go there.
We were both independent, strong-willed people, after all. I hadn’t survived two marriages and my time in Vegas with Joe Graydon, been a Vegas showgirl, and run my own school by being a wallflower.