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By Root 811 0

nothing less. From the day we took our wedding vows, though, Frank went out of his way to make me feel incredibly secure. Not only did he invite me to accompany him almost everywhere, which meant that he was rarely alone, but he never stopped showing his love for me. “Don’t take any notice,” he’d tell me when a woman homed in on him at a party or dinner and tried to seduce him. Even when strangers turned up at the gates of the Compound claiming to be the mother or grandmother of his child, I learned to ignore them as he did. This was old hat to him, after all. If Frank had sired as many children as people claimed he had, there would have been an entire subrace of blue-eyed singers with an aversion to garlic and an unusual obsession for neatness. In Frank’s words, if he were the womanizer everyone made him out to be, he’d have been a wonder of nature preserved in a specimen jar at Harvard.

There was one female fan of his that I came to recognize because she followed him so devotedly for years. I suppose these days people would call her a stalker. Her name was Betty Brink, and she’d been left some sort of inheritance that allowed her to purchase a front-row seat for virtually every concert Frank gave. We’d spot her ringside in auditoriums across the United States, and then we’d jet off to London, Paris, or Tokyo, and sure enough, Betty would be sitting there too. It was spooky. Even more so when we’d turn up at a restaurant and find Betty sitting in the next booth, her head tilted to listen to our conversations, to which she would occasionally chip in. She had an attractive face and blond hair, and once I came on the scene, she tried to make herself over to look more like me. She even researched which hairdressers I used and asked them to fix her hair just the same. She did everything she could to imitate me, wearing the same kinds of clothes and even adopting my way of walking and talking.

One day she went into the beauty shop at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, having made an appointment under my name. The girls there didn’t know it wasn’t me until she began to cause trouble, throwing cans of hair spray all over the place and making unreasonable demands. When they dialed my room and I picked up the telephone, they realized she was an impostor and threw her out. On another occasion, I received a call from one of the chicest restaurants in New York asking, “Are you coming, Mrs. Sinatra? It is two o’clock and we’ve been holding your table for sixteen for over an hour.”

I had made no such booking, and someone, probably Betty, had called up and made the reservation to make me look bad. Not long afterward, when Donald Trump was building his fifty-eight-story Trump Tower in New York, he called and left a message with Frank’s secretary, Dorothy. “Could you please ask Barbara to confirm if she wants three or four apartments in the Tower, because she only talked about three last time.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but Betty Brink did. She’d gone to the building site claiming to be me, and one of Donald’s staff had believed her. She’d not only viewed the prospective apartments but told them how she was going to knock down walls and decorate them just so to make a perfect place for “Frank and me” to live. I wouldn’t have minded because Betty was really rather pretty, but she had an ass the size of a house.

When Frank found out about her latest trick, though, that was the end for him. He told Mickey Rudin, “You have to get rid of that crazy dame. She’s not to come to the shows anymore; she’s not to be sold a seat at any venue where I’m performing. In fact, she’s barred from being anywhere near us.” He must have made it pretty clear, because Mickey went to see Ms. Brink in person and laid it on thick.

Not long afterward, we were at Caesars Palace for a series of shows and I came down in the elevator one night to take my seat. Walking past a small bar, I looked in and spotted a woman sitting by a mirror with a heavy black veil over her face. I stopped in my tracks, wandered in, and tapped her on the shoulder. “Hello, Betty,