Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [75]
The man held up his hands and cried, “But I’m Judge Walsworth! I’m the one who’s going to marry them!” None of us had met him yet. The entire event was like that, funny and exciting and crazy. I had the feeling that absolutely anything could happen, and why wouldn’t I feel that way? The impossible had already happened. Barbara Ann Blakeley from Bosworth, Missouri, was marrying Frank Sinatra.
On the morning of our wedding, July 11, 1976, I awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. “Good morning, sweetheart,” Frank said. “I can’t wait to marry you today. How long are you going to be?”
I got up, took a shower, and peered out at the world. This was it, the day I’d been waiting for with all my heart. I could hardly believe it. Opening the window to breathe in some fresh air, I was blasted by a wave of heat. It must have been 120 degrees in the shade and it was only nine in the morning. What was I thinking, getting married in July?
With the help of my matron of honor, Bee Korshak, I gathered my clothes together and prepared to go over to the Compound. Bee had become my closest girlfriend in Palm Springs. A beautiful blonde who’d once been an ice skater, she also had a terrific sense of humor with a wicked side to it even though she came from Mormon stock. “The Mormons don’t drink and they don’t smoke, but they sure fuck a lot!” she’d say with a wink.
Whenever I had one of my fights with Frank and needed to escape, I’d call Bee and say, “Let’s go somewhere!” and she’d always reply, “Okay.” She didn’t care where we went or what we did. Her husband, Sidney, was usually working hard in Chicago or New York (when he wasn’t negotiating my divorce from Zeppo), and she was game for anything. We traveled throughout Europe, went for a spa break in Arizona with Dinah Shore and Veronique Peck, and took shopping trips to New York. Bee and I knew that as soon as bouquets of flowers began to crowd my hotel suite, Frank was ready to make up. His message might say something like “Come back, although if you can put up with me you’re crazier than I am.” I wasn’t always ready to go home immediately, so I’d stay on for a few extra days with Bee just to make him wait.
Because the world’s media had suspected all along that Frank and I were not merely getting engaged, Palm Springs was choked with TV crews, press photographers, and reporters. Lee Annenberg sent out trays of water and iced tea so that no one died of the heat. To avoid prying eyes, I went to Frank’s house the back way, across the golf course. My mother was waiting, and she and Bee helped get me ready. I couldn’t help wondering what Irene Blakeley was thinking as she helped me slip into my wedding dress that day. Back in the thirties, she’d been brave enough to rattle the bars of her Bosworth cage and rail against its confines. “Will-is!” she’d cry. “There are much better opportunities for us elsewhere.” She could never have imagined how much better those opportunities would be, especially for me. In spite of our many differences of opinion over the years, I never forgot what she did for me. Thanks to her drive and determination, I’d embraced opportunity after opportunity as it came my way and was now taking on the greatest challenge of my life. As I stared at my own reflection in the mirror, just as I had stared at hers when I was a little girl, I knew I had inherited both her looks and her courage.
My wedding gown was made by the designer Halston and was off one shoulder in beige. He’d added drifts of chiffon and a single flowing sleeve. He made me an almost identical dress in pink satin for the evening party; both of them were my “something new.” My “old” was an emerald and diamond brooch belonging to Bee, my “borrowed” was a lace handkerchief from my mother, and I wore a blue garter. I asked Frank to wear a brand-new beige silk and linen suit to match my dress and he carried the baby rings he’d given his children as his something old and borrowed. He wore a blue cornflower in his lapel.
Frank and I had never talked about