Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [74]
The next thing I knew I was in Catholic school learning all about my new faith. I studied for about a year. Unlikely as it sounds, Dolly, that tough old dame from Hoboken, became my catechism coach and enlisted her favorite priests, Fathers Rooney, Blewitt, and Geimer, to help us. As she trained me in the finer points of Catholicism, we finally became friends. I think she realized at last what so many people had been saying—that I was good for Frank.
Even when I was with Zeppo, she’d come to realize that I was someone she could rely on. She’d ask my help with problems and the unlikeliest of tasks. By the time I was engaged to Frank, that dependence had increased tenfold. One day Dolly called to tell me, “Barbara, I’ve got mice. What should I do?”
“Get some cats.”
“Where from?”
“The pound.”
“Will you take me?”
So I drove her to the pound, picked out a couple of cats, stopped in at a vet’s for them to get their shots, and delivered them back to her house. A few weeks later she called me up again. “Barbara, these frigging cats have a skin condition called infantigo, and now I’ve got it! I’m itching all over. Will you come and pick these mothers up?” I went over and collected the cats, took them back to the vet, and finally took them to live in Zeppo’s house, where they became best friends with his two Weimaraners, Fleet and Sandy. The only trouble was Zeppo caught infantigo from them as well, whereas I seemed to be immune.
I had never forgotten Walter Annenberg’s promise to me about marrying Frank. The two men had been friends ever since Walter and his wife, Lee, met Frank in Palm Springs in the 1950s. I tracked Walter down in London and placed a telephone call. “Are you sitting down?” I asked him. “You won’t believe it, but Frank and I are finally getting married.”
“That’s wonderful news, Barbara!”
“We’d like to take you up on your offer to be married at Sunnylands.”
“Great! When?”
“We were thinking it would be nice to get married on Bobby’s birthday in October.”
Walter was horrified. “You can’t possibly wait that long! Frank’s far too mercurial. It’ll have to be sooner than that. I’ll be in Palm Springs July tenth through twelfth.”
July was only two months away, but 7/11 had always rolled nicely off the tongue, so that was the date we picked. We were to be married in the main house in front of two hundred guests before relocating to the Compound for a reception catered by Chasen’s. Lee promised to take care of everything at the Sunnylands ceremony with the help of Harriet Deutsch, another old friend of Frank’s. It was so wonderfully kind of them.
To try to keep the media from intruding, we claimed that the Annenbergs were throwing us an engagement party and that we’d be marrying sometime later, at a venue to be announced. I went to see Zeppo a few days beforehand and told him the same story. His house looked out onto Sunnylands, and I didn’t want him to hear it from anyone else. He seemed to take my news quite well and wished me every happiness, but there was a new sadness about him, I thought. When the press approached him later, he told them, “Barbara is a wonderful lady. Frank Sinatra could never find a better woman.” Ever the gambler, he added, “I’m sorry I lost her, but that’s the way it goes. You win some and you lose some.”
As the big day approached, people began to fly into Palm Springs from around the world. To welcome them all the night before the wedding, Frank threw a party at a favorite haunt of his, the Ingleside Inn. A Spanish-style resort set on twenty acres, the inn had everything, including a pool, an award-winning restaurant, and the seclusion we wanted. Halfway through the evening Frank was looking around the reception when he spotted a stranger. Fearing it might be a reporter, he said to Jilly, “See the guy at ten o’clock? As you’re showing him out, find out who he is.”
Jilly approached the man and said to him, “Let’s go, buster. You can