Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [69]
As another favor I asked Frank if he could arrange to do a show in Wichita, Kansas, because I had so many friends and family there who were desperate to see him perform. I must admit that this time I couldn’t wait to go back to the town where I’d spent my teenage years to show them what the gangly country girl with the “Missour-a” twang had done with herself. I’d never lost touch with my school friend Winnie Markley, and when she heard that we were coming to town she and her husband, Jimmy Razook, threw us a party at their house. Needless to say, when we arrived there was a long lineup of people who wanted to shake hands with Frank. Everyone I’d ever known, it seemed, came out of the woodwork. He was very patient and met them all and posed for photographs with incredible grace.
Frank’s show the following night was to be held in a huge sports auditorium, and fifty of my friends and relatives were all lined up in chairs right at the front of the old basketball court as Frank stepped out onto that stage. The show was a huge success. Best of all, Barbara Blakeley was officially on the map and no longer just the skinny kid with the hunched-over back.
A few weeks later Frank and I had another one of our increasingly frequent bust-ups; I can’t even remember over what. I think he said something that hurt my feelings and I refused to go on with the schedule so I started packing (I always seemed to be packing in those days). It was all part of the game of cat and mouse that we played. The story about our latest split made the gossip columns, and my aunt Myrtle wrote to me from Wichita to thank me for the tickets to his show and to send me her condolences. “I think I know why you broke up,” she added wryly. “He met your family!”
The culmination of Frank’s tour was a live concert billed as the Main Event at Madison Square Garden in New York with him performing in the round on a mock boxing ring without ropes. When he realized I was serious about leaving him this time, he begged me to stay on until that gig, which he was especially nervous about.
Even though he’d proved himself more than able, he was anxious about his voice. Not only would there be twenty thousand people, including celebrities like Robert Redford and Rex Harrison, in the auditorium but the show was to be broadcast around the world. I sat a couple of rows back from the raised square stage on which world championship boxing matches usually took place. Frank turned up less than an hour before the performance, walked on with hardly any rehearsal, and gave one of his most memorable performances. He needn’t have worried. Even when his voice wavered a little, he was such a great communicator that he tuned in to his audience as he always did and allowed his phenomenal stage presence to overwhelm them. They were deliriously happy just to be breathing the same air. Despite fretting about our impending separation, Frank appeared happy too. He loved performing live, and New York was where it all started for him. Before he sang “The House I Live In,” he spoke of his father, “God rest his soul,” and how Marty had once told Frank that America was “a land of dreams and a dream land.” I knew Frank meant it from the heart when he told that Garden crowd, “I have never felt so much love in one room my whole life.” After announcing, “We’ll now do the national anthem, but you needn’t rise,” he finished with “My Way.”
The following day, I flew off to Palm Beach, Florida, for a break with some friends. I was still madly, crazily in love with Frank, but I knew I had to give us both a breather. Our separation this time was the longest and the most serious. For several months at the end of 1974 and beginning of 1975, we even dated other people, although I’m sure we each did it just to make the other one jealous. Frank stepped out with Jacqueline Onassis, who’d been a longtime friend from the Kennedy days and was by then working in publishing. He took her to