Barbara Sinatra (1926–2017)

Frank Sinatra. I don’t have to type anything else. I came of age when hard rock was blasting from every kids radio, but I have always preferred songs that told a story, crooners, and of course, a great saloon song. When someone asks me about the music of the last 50 years, I always say, “I quit listening when Sinatra quit recording.” What a voice for a man whose ear drum was perforated at birth!

I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. S. two of the times he performed in St. Louis…once in the 1980s and the other in the mid-1990s. By the latter, his voice wasn’t as strong as it used to be and he would forget some of the lyrics. But his charisma exuded from the moment he walked on stage was overwhelming. It’s was worth every penny I paid for those tickets.

When I stumbled upon his widow’s memoir of her life with the legendary singer, I couldn’t pass up a chance to read about his life. The all-nighters, the parties, the loyalty, the charm, the compassion, the women, the generosity, are tales fit for the tabloids. I learned he liked to paint in his later years, loved to read (I knew we had something in common), and do crossword puzzles (and he did them in ink).

Barbara Ann Blakely, from Bosworth, Missouri, first heard Sinatra at a drive-in when she was fifteen years old. She had no way of knowing that she would someday become the love of her life. At least that’s her story. But I have to wonder.

True, she was his longest-lasting marriage, 22 years. In Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank, Barbara comes off as a gold digger. As much as I enjoyed reading about their personal lives, there was always that feeling I had that she didn’t love him as much as she loved his money and his fame; not near as much he seemed, in this telling, to love her.

I liked the conversational, breezy style Barbara uses (with the help of co-author Wendy Holden). The stories were intriguing but never went into gory detail, except perhaps in the details of Mr. S’s good friend Jilly Rizzo’s death. That gave me nightmares. At the very heart of Barbara’s remembering, in my eyes, is Mr. S’s loneliness. An only child, he seemed to have felt that his entire life. He felt as deeply as his songs made others feel. That’s the best way to describe it.

His descent into old age was glossed over. There were two mentions of him sitting in wheelchairs and mentions of his health issues. They were disconcerting, and I wanted to know more about how old age was wearing him down.

The most touching scene in the book is Mr. S’s death at age 82. As Barbara begs him to fight him to fight, he whispers, “I can’t.” Probably the only time in his life that he said that.

I wondered how other readers felt Barbara came off, so I perused that reviews on Amazon. There I noticed many attacks on Barbara. While she didn’t come off so well, I don’t feel a need to hate her. It’s okay to hate characters, but the ones I read were really tough on her. I tried to judge the book by its ability to hold my attention, to keep turning the page, and to allow me to take a small peek at one of the entertainers I most admire. And Lady Blue Eyes does just that, which is why I give it 5 out of 5 stars.… (altro)

The author is the widow of Frank Sinatra. She was his fourth wife, and their marriage lasted longer than his previous three put together (and longer than her previous two marriages put together).

In this book, she not only talks about her life with Frank, but also describes growing up in the sleepy town of Bosworth, Missouri, from where she moved to Wichita with her parents and became a model. She decribes her unhappy marriage to Bob Harrison Oliver, with whom she had her son Bobby, and her second marriage to Zeppo Marx (of Marx Brothers fame). Finally, she describes her relationship with Frank, how it started, progressed to marriage, and how they apparently had a very happy life together.

There are some good things about this book. It’s an undemanding read, and even the parts of Barbara Sinatra’s life that happened before she met Frank Sinatra were illuminating. However, the vast majority of the story is understandably given over to their life together.

Unfortunately, I found it difficult to warm to, or even like, the author very much. I suspect that she wants the viewer to believe that she and Frank were the absolute loves of each other’s lives, and nobody who they had relationships with before even really mattered. It also seemed like she was trying to convince the reader that nothing she ever did wrong was her fault. Ever. She cheated on both of her first two husbands – the first time with Joe Graydon, the television host, who was a married man himself. While married to Zeppo Marx (and poor old Zeppo does not come out of this account very well), she flew to Monaco for a holiday and said that she worried about what Zeppo might get up to with other women while she was away – but this was while she herself was flying away for an illicit liaison with Frank Sinatra!

She claimed at one point to be ‘joined at the hip’ to her son Bobby, but this is the child who she dumped on her parents when he was just a small toddler, while she swanned off to Vegas with her married lover, and became a Vegas showgirl. Later in life, Bobby moved to Switzerland and met a girl who he wanted to marry.

Her love of money and the glamourous life is also plain to see. Barbara describes in detail many of the pieces of jewellery that Frank bought for her (yet his children and grandchildren barely get mentioned in this book, and his daughters Nancy and Tina are never mentioned by name. This may of course be because Barbara famously did not get on with Nancy and Tina Sinatra. Far from the account of a very happy marriage that is described here, Tina believed that Barbara made Frank’s life a misery. Nobody who was not there can really know the truth, but there’s no reason to suppose that both women aren’t telling the truth as they see it; after all, different people can have widely differing perspectives on the same situation). She more or less admits that she married Zeppo for his money, and when she wanted to leave him at one point, she decided not to, because after all, she could have gone back to work if she had to but after years of not having to earn her own money, that would be very tough on her.

However, while I still have not been able to warm up to Barbara Sinatra at all, I did enjoy the latter part of her story, because that is where – to me at least – Frank Sinatra was portrayed as less of a personality, and more of a person. I even shed a tear when reading about how devastated he was when his old friends Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr died, and the respective stories of Frank’s mother Dolly’s death in a plane crash, and his own death also made me cry. I think it was during these moments that I could see a flash of how Barbara must have actually loved her husband very much (although I’m not sure if she would have loved him so much if he had not been rich and famous).

There are some funny anecdotes in the book – not just about Sinatra, but about the many famous people who were his friends. Initially the name dropping got on my nerves a bit, but I can forgive it, because if Barbara Sinatra’s life with Frank involved mingling with celebrities, it would be hard to discuss that life without mentioning those people. There’s little doubt though that this is a sanitised version of Frank Sinatra, and there are no real new insights for fans. The book demonstrates his immense charisma, the fact that he could be difficult to work with, but also generous to a fault. An interesting read, but there are better biographies of Frank Sinatra out there.… (altro)