Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [88]
Our hospitality suite was a huge Bedouin tent set up in the middle of the desert near where camel trains had been passing for centuries. Poor things, they had to be rerouted temporarily. Seeing them tramping past in the dunes day after day was fascinating and primitive. It was a long way from my first sight of a camel in a textbook in Bosworth, when I’d wondered if such a strange creature really existed. Watching the camels made me want to ride one, so I asked if it could be arranged. Frank wasn’t going anywhere near one, but he hung around to watch me and take photographs. After climbing up onto the back of the beast, I was led along a dirt track by a dark-skinned Arab in a long robe as Frank snapped away. It was surprisingly high up there and felt rather precarious, even more so when my camel suddenly broke free from his handler and galloped off into the desert.
As I clung on for dear life, I could hear Frank going crazy behind me, screaming at the handler in unadulterated New Jersey. “You f****** mother f*****! How could you let this happen, you son of a bitch! Get my wife back here! Go get her.” He called that guy every name in the book. Fortunately, the camel finally stopped to nibble at a desert bush, leaving me shaken and breathless but unharmed. Frank, meanwhile, was still jumping around in the dust blasting the poor man responsible.
Suddenly, the hapless Arab pulled off his headdress and threw it into the dirt. He told Frank, “Look, Mr. Sinatra, I’m not Egyptian. I’m from New Jersey.” Pointing to his skin, he added, “This is makeup, and you really shouldn’t talk to people like that!”
Once Frank realized I was safe, he had no choice but to see the funny side.
Ever since Dolly’s death, Frank seemed to find solace in the religion his mother had taught him and then me. He began to attend Mass with me more often, and he loved it when I took over a fund-raising project of Dolly’s to rebuild a church in Cathedral City. With the help of a golf tournament, we managed to raise more than her target amount. One thing that kept haunting him, though, was the fact that we had never been officially married in the eyes of our church.
The more Frank thought about that, the more the omission bugged him. Still grieving for his dead mother, he told me morosely, “She’d have wanted that.” As someone who’d been married three times before and who’d chosen a wife who’d tied the knot twice, he didn’t believe it would ever be possible. That was until he sought the counsel of Father Tom Rooney, a family friend. To Frank’s surprise, he learned that according to the laws of our faith the only marriage that counted was his twelve-year partnership with his first wife, Nancy—the only one that had been sanctified in a Catholic church. If Frank could have that marriage annulled, we would be free to repeat our wedding vows in a way that he believed would appease his mother’s spirit. I loved the idea of being properly married in the eyes of the church I’d embraced as my own, but I knew the suggestion of an annulment would be controversial and I had no intention of getting involved. I hadn’t been with Frank all those years and learned nothing about keeping my nose out of his private