Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [82]
Other nights, we’d host a party at home so that we wouldn’t have to go out. Then Vine and I would run around and call our friends until I had an interesting group of thirty or forty people lined up, plus all the food and booze they’d need. Sometimes for fun, I’d divide our guests up into groups so that we’d have separate tables for actors, singers, industrialists, or moguls. The guest list would depend on who was in town but would include all the usual suspects, plus friends like Tim Conway, Roger and Luisa Moore, Dick and Dolly Martin, Chuck Connors, Louis and “Quique” Jourdan, or the singer Jerry Vale and his wife, Rita. Just like his father before him, Frank would cook at least one special dish to add to the menu. After dinner, we might show a first-run movie in the projection room complete with popcorn and candy, or Frank might go to his train room to oil the engines or change the cars with some of his buddies.
The Compound was very masculine in style when I first knew it, what I called “early Italian.” There were plastic flowers in vases and a great deal of orange paint on everything from the walls to the oversize refrigerators. Soon after I moved in, I asked if I could do something about the décor. Frank couldn’t have cared less what I did with the place; he just didn’t want to get involved. He told me, “Do it exactly the way you want and then show me.” With the help of Bee Korshak, whose judgment as an interior designer I valued, I opened up some of the rooms and created new bathrooms and dressing rooms. I also turned one of the spare bedrooms into an art studio for Frank so that he could pursue his interest in painting. I freshened everything else up with lighter desert colors and added a few feminine touches. It remained very much Frank’s home, with his art collection on the walls along with all his memorabilia, including statues, photographs, and awards, as well as the red phone once installed in the den as a hotline to the White House. By the time I’d finished, though, the Compound looked what I called “late Italian.”
In my childhood I’d loved going into the backyard to pick corn, melons, tomatoes, and basil for the kitchen, so I wanted to re-create a little corner of Bosworth in Palm Springs. In an underused area of the estate, I developed a garden in which I grew most of our own vegetables and herbs. My parents loved to help me plant seedlings or pick fresh produce; I often think that was where my father was happiest whenever they came to visit. With soil beneath his fingernails again, he taught me a few tricks—like how to keep bugs away by pushing a clove of garlic into the ground and setting beer traps for slugs. Out in our garden, amid the towering sunflowers and the soldiers of corn, Willis Blakeley was in his element.
The Compound’s buildings and guesthouses had been named by Frank after the friends who’d stayed there over the years. There was the Kennedy house, the Agnew house, and the Cerf house (after the Random House founder Bennett Cerf, whom Frank dubbed the Bookmaker). I thought it would be fun to name them after Frank’s favorite songs, so the main building became “The House I Live In,” and the guesthouses were renamed “All the Way,” “The Tender Trap,” “High Hopes,” “Young at Heart,” and “The Good Life.” The projection theater was “Send in the Clowns” and Frank’s office—decorated with framed photographs from his more than fifty movies—was aptly dubbed “My Way.” The master bedroom was christened “True Love,” and the room he’d sleep in if he wanted to stay up later than I did was called “I Sing the Songs.” Situated next to the pool, it was a quiet, simple space, not at all ostentatious, as one might imagine. In one corner was a statue of St. Francis, a saint Frank identified with not only because of his name and nationality but because of his love of animals.
If we weren’t home recovering from a tour, or hosting guests at Easter and just about every holiday, we were on the road so that Frank could continue to entertain his fans. As