Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [87]
As we ate Italian food in Dolly’s honor after the funeral, I was just so grateful that her body had been found. Frank may have been sixty-one years old, but he was still an orphan who needed to know that his mother was at rest, next to Marty, close enough for him to visit. As Frank himself said, Dolly could finally “sleep warm.”
Life went on after Dolly’s death, just as it always had. Frank canceled two weeks of performances and we flew to Barbados to spend some time at the place we loved, but performing was Frank’s therapy and he needed to get back on the stage. It was also what his mother would have expected, for there had surely never been a woman more proud of her son.
Driven by that thought, Frank arranged it so that our next few years were spent almost exclusively on the road. He also performed at numerous benefits, did fund-raisers for Ronald Reagan, recorded several new songs, and fulfilled commitments at Caesars in Vegas and Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe. He gave a lauded performance in the TV movie Contract on Cherry Street. Never once forgetting his bride, he took me on vacations to Barbados and Monaco between legs of the tour. Some of his finest performances that year were in the smaller clubs, like the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, places he chose deliberately to give people a chance to see and hear him on a more intimate level. He’d make a point of ensuring that tickets to any concert of his be scaled in price so that ordinary people could afford them. Not that there weren’t some incredible venues as well. Flying around the world in a plane he named Barbara Ann, I watched my husband perform in front of the Acropolis in Athens, the Colosseum in Rome, and the Sphinx in Egypt.
It was on that trip to Egypt, with Bobby along with us, that we probably had the best time (although sadly I did catch hepatitis B from the water and thought I was going to die). President Anwar Sadat was married to a beautiful lady called Jehan. She had a birthday coming up, and Anwar asked her what she wanted. “I’m not going to say, because you’ll never give it to me,” she told him with a sigh. This went on for several weeks until finally he said, “Tell me what you want!”
Frank and I had gone through something similar at around the same time. He’d badgered me to tell him what I wanted for my birthday, but I couldn’t think of a thing. Then on a day out with a girlfriend I drove past the Rolls-Royce showroom in Beverly Hills and spotted the most divine white Corniche with camel leather seats in the window. “I think I know what I’d like for my birthday,” I told him from the car.
“Shoot,” he said. To my delight and surprise, the Corniche was waiting for me in the driveway when I arrived home from my lunch. A note on it read, “For my True Love.”
President Sadat must have wondered what he’d gotten himself into by offering his wife anything she wanted, because Jehan asked for money to build an extraordinary city of hospitals and rehabilitation centers for the veterans of the 1967 Six-Day War, in which fifteen thousand Egyptians were killed or wounded. To be named the Faith and Hope Rehabilitation Center, it would offer vocational training for the amputees and wounded, employing other veterans to support those being treated. It was a remarkable and innovative scheme that had never been tried before. Knowing how much funding the project would require, Jehan asked Frank if he could include a visit to Cairo on his next tour for a benefit. As always, Frank’s reply was “Tell me where I have to be and when.” Furthermore, he flew in all his own musicians, paying their wages, airfares, and hotels. It didn’t cost the charity a dime.
I think of all the men I’ve met in my life (and I’ve met