Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Three hours later, Frank was onstage, somehow managing to perform for a full-house audience while a search crew was being organized to look for his missing mother. “I know he did it for his mother,” Nancy said of that concert. Sinatra received a standing ovation; no one in the audience had even a hint of the nightmare unfolding in his personal life.

  “It was the most terrible night of his life,” said Eileen Faith, a friend of Barbara’s at that time. “How he was able to go on, no one knew. There was that hope, that small ray of hope, that maybe, somehow, Dolly had escaped injury. It was impossible to comprehend her dying that way. She hardly ever flew, maybe a couple of times a year. No one could accept it. After the first show, Frank canceled the rest of the engagement and flew back to Palm Springs.”

  On Friday, the next morning, Nancy and Hugh and Tina (who was by now separated from Wes Farrell) arrived in Palm Springs to support Frank and Barbara. Frankie decided to try to take a survey helicopter up to look for his grandmother, but the weather wouldn’t allow it.

  On Saturday, the nightmare continued. Still no word. Frank was so deep in mourning by this time, he wouldn’t speak to anyone, even his wife. “I’d walk past every hour or so, catch his eye, and give him a smile, but his eyes wouldn’t even flicker,” she later recalled. His friends and family members told her that this was the way he grieved; it’s how he had been with JFK and Marilyn, and especially with his father, they explained. Finally, he went up in a Civil Air Patrol helicopter with a pilot named Don Landells, searching the snow-swept mountainside for Dolly. They didn’t find any wreckage.

  By the third day, Sunday, a sense of hopelessness had enveloped the Sinatra compound as everyone—not just Frank—walked about in a daze, stunned by the sinking-in reality of what had occurred. Desperate to do something, Tina and Nancy telephoned the famed Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos. Hurkos promised the Sinatra daughters that he would do what he could and get back to them.15

  Then, at 11:25 p.m., the family got the call. Wreckage from the Learjet had finally been found by Don Landells, who had again gone out in search of it. The jet was split in two, the nose destroyed. The wings and tail had been torn from the aircraft. It was later learned that the plane had crashed into the 11,502-foot mountain—the same one that would later claim Dean Martin’s son Dean Paul—at full takeoff speed of 375 miles per hour as a result of a mix-up in communications from the control tower and also bad weather conditions. Of course, there were no survivors.

  Heartbreaking images of poor Dolly, panicked and horror-stricken in her last moments, haunted the family when they again gathered in the Sinatra living room; Frank was devastated. “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye,” he said, crying. Mickey Rudin told everyone that Dolly was found strapped to her seat. Even though everyone suspected that this was an unlikely scenario, they tried desperately to believe it. But who would go to identify Dolly’s body the next day, once it was brought back to the Palm Springs morgue? Mickey said he would do it, but then couldn’t bring himself to go. It fell upon Jilly, but he couldn’t go either. Eventually, it was Barbara who volunteered. It must have been terrible for her, but she summoned up her courage and did what she knew she had to do for her husband. He was very grateful.

  The funeral was at St. Louis Roman Catholic Church in Cathedral City, outside Palm Springs, on January 12, 1977. Dolly was buried at Desert Memorial Park, next to Marty, whose body, at her request, had earlier been exhumed in New Jersey and moved to Palm Springs. Dean Martin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Leo Durocher, Danny Thomas, Pat Henry, and Jilly Rizzo were pallbearers. The Associated Press said that Sinatra’s “eyes were unswerving from the casket covered with white lilies and pink roses.”

  Many of his intimates believed that Frank would never recover from his mother’s sudden, tragic death.

  “My father was devastated,” recalled Frank Jr. “The days that followed were the worst I had ever known. He said nothing for hours at a time. All of us who were nearby felt helpless to find any way to ease his agony. Back at home after that terrible hour at the graveside, I felt it best not to leave him alone. I sat with him and watched the tears roll one by one down his face.”

  “Who Died and Left Barbara Boss?”

  For the last few years, Barbara had tolerated the Sinatra daughters and their barely suppressed mistrust of her. She’d not had an actual fight with either of them, it was just a sense she got that they didn’t approve of her. They were distant. Ever since they’d heard that Barbara had balked at signing the prenuptial agreement, they were suspicious. Tina Sinatra claims she heard from a mutual friend that Barbara said, “This time I married for money.”

  Barbara didn’t know how Frank Jr. felt about her, but she suspected he was more likely to give her the benefit of the doubt, or at least that’s what she gleaned based on his fractured relationship with everyone else. He was so detached, she didn’t feel he was in alignment with anyone in the family about anything. As for Nancy Sr., it was never Barbara’s interest to win her over. She realized after her first entreaties to Nancy that the first wife would never get along with the present wife, nor should there be any reason for her to do so if it didn’t come naturally. That was fine with Barbara; she already had plenty of friends. Therefore, with the passing of the years, everyone acted quite cordially at family events and did what they could to keep smiling, and Barbara felt that was about the best she could expect from the Sinatras. Over time, the daughters’ mistrust of her bothered her less. She lived in her own utopian world and had a very exciting and busy life with Frank, especially on the road. She was with Frank twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and if Nancy and Tina had a problem with that, it would be up to them to make the necessary adjustments, or so Barbara had long ago decided.

  Barbara didn’t want a family war with Nancy and Tina. However, she was also a formidable woman; she demanded respect from those around her. The Sinatra daughters were exactly the same way. So it was just a matter of time before all of the unspoken tension within the family would build to an explosive level. Ironically, it would be a disagreement having to do with Dolly that would set into motion a torrent of distrust and unhappiness for all.

  The day after the funeral, Barbara went over to Dolly’s house and took pretty much anything of value—diamonds, furs, mementos of her son’s life and career—as well as many things that meant very little, tchotchkes such as dishes and cheap silverware, and put everything in an enormous, locked closet in her bedroom at the compound. She felt it was the safest, wisest course of action to take. After all, there was always a great deal of traffic in and out of the compound, much of it people she didn’t even know. The place was filled with Frank’s drinking buddies, musicians, hangers-on, and other show-business types. It wasn’t exactly an environment where everyone could be closely monitored, nor should it have been; that wasn’t Frank’s way. Barbara felt that she owed it to Dolly to make certain that her treasured belongings were safely taken care of so that the family could have a chance to sort through them when they were emotionally able to do so. She was the newest member of the Sinatras. She’d been the one to take on the terrible job of identifying Dolly’s body when no one else had the courage for it. Therefore she felt that perhaps she alone had the presence of mind at this time to think in a practical way.

  Unfortunately, Nancy Jr. and Tina disagreed. Nancy went to Dolly’s house to see about her possessions and discovered that they had all been removed. She was very upset. She called Tina, and the two women did their own investigation and found out from one of the household employees what Barbara had done. “But who died and left Barbara in charge?” Nancy wanted to know. “Certainly not my grandmother!” Tina agreed. Barbara was new to the family, so what right did she have to take and then store Dolly’s belongings? For the next couple of weeks, the Sinatra women tried to keep their emotions in check. This was a delicate situation, and they knew it. But still, they were so upset it was impossible for them to just let it go.

  Nancy, who was th
irty-seven, was exactly like her dad; she knew what she knew and there was no talking her out of it. Like Frank, when she was angry, she was angry. She spoke her mind. This isn’t to say she was completely unreasonable, but she definitely would not back down from a fight—again like Frank.

  Tina, now twenty-nine, was not always as quick to come to conclusions—though she could at times beat her sister to them. Tina wasn’t sure if what Barbara had done was a big deal or not. When the time was right, she figured, they would sort it all out. Nancy was not inclined to agree. She thought it was a big deal, and that they’d better wise up about it before these kinds of unilateral decisions became the family norm. Finally, Tina decided to telephone Frank to tell him about it.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” was all Frank could muster when he heard the news. Tina assured him that she wasn’t joking. “Okay, I’ll look into it, Pigeon,” he said. “Just try to calm down.”

  When Frank talked to Barbara about it, she wasn’t the least bit evasive. She said, “Look, you’re the heir. I just did what I thought was best to protect you!” Protect him from whom, though? “This place is like a bus station, Frank,” she said in her defense. “I just thought it was the right thing to do, that Grandma would have wanted me to. I’m so busy, you’d think you would thank me for taking care of this!”

  Just the same, Frank told Barbara that his daughters were upset. He knew better than to take sides, though, and the fact that he didn’t hurt Barbara. “I’m surprised he isn’t just coming out to defend me,” she told her socialite friend Eileen Faith over drinks at Don the Beachcomber restaurant in Palm Springs. She swore that her motives were innocent. Why, she asked, would anyone think she would purposely do something to alienate the Sinatra daughters? “And don’t they think I don’t have enough jewels and nice things from their father?” she asked. “He has already given me the world! Why would I want Grandma’s few, precious treasures. It’s just so ridiculous.”

  “Then the three of you need to sit down and hash it out, without Frank,” Eileen suggested. Barbara said that she wasn’t sure that was the way to handle it. She said that Frank knew his daughters better than she did, and that she should probably follow his lead. Her friend disagreed. She said that, as a woman, Barbara would best know how to deal with so delicate a situation. Also, when it came to family politics, from what Barbara had earlier suggested, perhaps Frank was not the best one to rely on to handle anything of a sensitive nature. That was certainly true.

  When Barbara discussed the matter with Frank again, he told her that the best thing she could do was not to make a bigger issue of it by forcing an all-out confrontation. Maybe if she just put Dolly’s possessions back where she’d found them, the storm would blow over, or at least that’s what he hoped. He said Nancy and Tina could then go through everything and pick out what they wanted to keep for themselves. This arranged distribution of property was fine with Barbara. She had always figured that this was the way it would happen anyway, when the family wasn’t so emotionally raw.

  When Nancy and Tina finally got to Dolly’s house in Palm Springs and began sorting through the valuables, they said that they found a good many things missing—jewels, furs, and other costly items. Now that the landscape was so riddled with suspicion, they couldn’t help but wonder: Had Frank told Barbara she could have anything she wanted before they’d had an opportunity to make their own selections? If so, they felt it did not bode well for them. “She’d been ‘protecting’ Dad’s interests,” Tina would note of Barbara years later. “But from who? The answer was obvious and disturbing. Barbara was protecting my father from the people she perceived as her stiffest remaining competition. From his children.”

  Adopting a New Sinatra?

  In the beginning, Barbara Marx couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that she was officially Mrs. Frank Sinatra. “For a long time I had to pinch myself almost daily to believe that I, Barbara Ann Blakeley, the gangly kid in pigtails from the whistle stop of Bosworth, Missouri, had somehow become the wife of Francis Albert Sinatra. Could I really be married to the singer whose voice I’d first heard at a drive-in when I was fifteen years old?” Once she got used to the idea, though, she melded into it, her identity and Frank’s becoming one. She was quite happy, and she believed in her heart that Frank felt the same way. Did she also want her son, Bobby, to share in the prestige and entitlement of being a Sinatra? That’s what Tina Sinatra had to wonder when in the spring of 1977 she received a telephone call from Mickey Rudin.

  Something was brewing, Mickey told Tina, and he wanted to make her aware of it: Frank was about to adopt Barbara’s son, Bobby. But Bobby Marx was twenty-five. Tina said she had never heard of a grown man being adopted. However, Mickey said it was definitely going to happen and that if she wanted to do something about it, she’d better hurry. Tina said she needed a moment to collect herself and try to figure out how best to handle this surprising situation.

  It’s not known how she learned about it—maybe also from Mickey?—but Nancy didn’t need time to collect herself. She got Frank on the phone and let him have it.

  Nancy, Tina, and Frankie would certainly have no financial worries after their father’s death (they would still inherit all of his record royalties, while Barbara would receive most of the property), whether or not Bobby was in the picture, but that wasn’t exactly the point of Nancy’s contention. “My concern was that giving him the family name would be wrong, for him, for us. After all the ‘Mamma Mia’ jokes, what would they do with the sudden appearance of Bobby Sinatra? I couldn’t help feeling that to be a Sinatra kid, you had to pay your dues, had to go through the tough times with the business and the press and the personal crises,” Nancy would say. “To be a Sinatra, you needed a history that carried a mix of pain and prominence. A bit second-rate of me, perhaps. Everybody has troubles, but someone just can’t step in and take over. It doesn’t work.”

  This new family debate would be waged for many months, again with the Sinatra daughters never actually confronting Barbara or even Bobby about it. Again there was a sense, fostered by Frank, that if the three women discussed it openly, it would just make things worse. The daughters’ beef, then, ended up being with Frank—not with Barbara.

  Though Nancy was beyond trying to reason out this situation, Tina could actually see how Frank might decide that Bobby should be a part of the family since he was Barbara’s only son. Why shouldn’t he be legally embraced by the family? Ava didn’t have children and neither did Mia, she maintained, so this truly was new terrain for everyone.

  Tina knew her dad well. She understood the way he processed conflict. Now that there was so much contention about this issue, she suspected he was pulling his hair out trying to figure out how to make everyone happy. She also knew it wasn’t possible. Someone was going to win and someone was going to lose—and she and her sister were not going to lose. Tina’s mind was made up: She wasn’t going to allow any adoption.

  One major concern of both Tina’s and Nancy’s was how an adoption of Bobby Marx might affect Frank Jr., now thirty-three. If Frank wanted so desperately to forge a close relationship with an adult male, shouldn’t it be with his own biological son? Frank Jr. wanted to stay out of the fray, though. For him it was to be business as usual. As always, he would focus on his work, his friends, and his own life. He wanted nothing to do with this present conflict.

  “Have you lost your mind?” a very agitated Tina demanded to know of Frank on the telephone one morning. “You can’t do this!”

  Of course, trying to dictate to Frank Sinatra what he could and could not do never worked. Frank had always said his credo for others to follow was, “Don’t tell. Suggest.” Or as his friend David Tebbett put it, “You push Frank and you can forget all about it; there’s no chance in hell of him doing what you want.” Likely, Tina telling him that he was “out of his mind” didn’t sit well with her dad. In fact, according to one of his associates at that time, “It came to pass that the more people said, ‘No, y
ou can’t do this,’ the more he became determined to do it. The more his daughters pushed it, the more pissed off he became and the more determined he became.”

  “Why does everything have to be such a big fucking deal?” Frank raged during one meeting with associates over the adoption matter.

  “Well, look, Frank, obviously your kids weren’t going to be happy about this,” said one of his managers.

  “But this doesn’t even affect them,” Frank raged. “This hasn’t got one goddamn thing to do with them!” he shouted. “Why doesn’t everyone just shut up about it! Nobody is affected here but Bobby. He gets to be a Sinatra. That’s it. The will don’t change. The money don’t change. Nothing changes.”

  Of course, Frank couldn’t possibly have believed that adopting a son would not eventually have some bearing on his last will and testament. He wasn’t that naive. He also wasn’t thinking of the bigger picture. Of course, many in the Sinatra family assumed that the idea had been Barbara’s anyway. Was this plan really her way of securing her place and that of her son in the vast Sinatra financial empire? “But I had nothing to do with it,” Barbara would say in her defense. “This was all Frank’s idea.”