Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [9]
“Who are you talking to in there?” Mother would ask through my locked door.
“It’s the radio,” I’d lie.
At six o’clock on the morning of the screen test, I arrived at the Fox lot and spent two hours in makeup before being zipped into a beautiful white satin gown. Then I was led to the set and introduced to my leading man as the crew stood waiting. The clapboard clapped, the director yelled, “Action!” and my costar held me in his arms. “I want to go with you, Gilda,” he said. “Please take me. I know I did everything wrong.”
My mind froze. The first line my character had to say was “Johnny, isn’t it wonderful?” All I could stammer was “J-Johnny, I …” Unable to remember the rest of my line, I gulped, stared at the director helplessly, and looked to my lead for inspiration. Not only had my memory blanked but my throat felt cut.
The director told the cameras to keep rolling and tried to reassure me. “Barbara, sweetheart, you look stunning. You’ll be wonderful in this. Just relax.”
Each time I tried again, little more than a squeak came out, and then I broke into an unstoppable attack of schoolgirl giggles.
“Cut!”
Half-laughing, half-crying, I wanted to run from the stage, but somehow, in an endless series of retakes and hand-holding, we managed to shoot the entire scene. A few days later, I received a call from the studios. “You have no future in pictures,” the voice said with practiced finality. “Don’t even bother taking classes.”
Grateful that I’d told no one about my screen test, I accepted with some relief that Hollywood stardom wouldn’t be my future after all. What had I been thinking? I was just a farm girl from Missouri, after all. When Bob Oliver called again, I agreed to go out with him, curious what this loony boy might do next.
By our fifth date he’d calmed down a little and stopped begging me to marry him. Instead, he took me to meet his family, who welcomed me as one of their own. His grandfather Joe, who had a thick Italian accent, reminded me of dear old Pa. Bob’s father, whose nickname was Butter, for Buttermilk, was a remote southerner who drank too much. His mother, Marge, was a tiny terror of a woman who ran the Rose Room single-handedly and seemed to like me.
The family would gather every Sunday for a delicious but quarrelsome dinner. Throughout the meal and poker game afterward, everyone seemed to do or say terrible things to one another and then kiss and make up. I’d never seen anything like it. This volatile Italian family couldn’t have been further removed from my own, and I was beguiled. I wasn’t in love with Bob, but he clearly worshipped me. He had a great sense of humor, and his lifestyle offered adventure beyond anything I’d known. My Belmont Shore crown had been handed back. I was selling clothes at a downtown store and picking up occasional modeling jobs. Life was dull, and my mother had drummed into me that I should never settle for dullness.
When Bob told me he was going to New York to find work as a band singer, I cracked. Manhattan had spelled excitement to me ever since the days when my mother’s Harper’s Bazaar arrived in Bosworth smelling of ink. We married in September 1948 at the Lakewood Community Methodist Church, Long Beach. Twenty-one years old, I wore an ornate white lace and satin gown with a seed-pearl tiara and had two page boys scatter rose petals in my path. My father gave me away. After a reception for two hundred guests at Le Club Moderne, at which Nat King Cole played piano