‘Just prior to Barbara and Dad becoming engaged.' Barbra Sinatra she had a a great deal of resentment to face. It didn't not bother her one iota. She coped. According to her onetime housekeeper Joan Hanna she told her husband:' You try to buy their love. They've never had to stand on their own two feet. None of them work for a living -- they're living off the Sinatra name. Stop giving and see how often they come around.' The kids stuck. So did Barbara -- the longest serving Sinatra wife following Nancy Barbato , Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow. A decade ago they almost divorced. A couple of signatures would have done it but the papers were shredded. The children were despairing. They found more to worry about. It seemed that their father had arranged for his marriage to their mother -- making them illegitimate -- to be annulled by the Vatican . It was resolved -- but they blamed their stepmother. Nancy Sinatra admitted a year before her father's death:' We've had to come to terms with her being around. In the past few years everything is a lot better.' However, there was never any question who is in control. ‘ Barbara is a woman with a mind of her own. She does what she feels correct and no one gets in the way,' says a family intimate adding:' She looked after Frank and his interests for many years and I don't think anyone can complain. She is the one who must administer his legacy -- watch over his image.' It was Barbara Sinatra who decided on the move from their longtime home -- known as The Compound -- in the Californian desert resort of Rancho Mirage into the mainstream of Beverly Hills . She dictated they go to the opera in Los Angeles and, suddenly, the man who used to run amok across headlines and propriety was being described as confused and ‘barely-recognisable'. Indeed, he did look like a lost stranger in the night. The family wanted him home, without any of his barber shop of wigs, and in his favourite blue and white pyjamas walking his King Charles spaniels. Barbara wanted him in the spotlight believing that was the battery that kept him ticking. All families have conflicting thoughts and values. It's just that with the Sinatras you were talking an entertainment legend and a a multi-million dollar legacy. And Barbara Sinatra is in charge. She always has been in control. He was 60 and she was 46 when they married in July, 1976 -- three months before their announced wedding date.Barbara had wanted to be Mrs Frank as soon as possible. From then on, if not always smoothly, it has gone her way.He has never called her a ‘broad' in public -- a verbal brand on every other woman he has been involved with or married to -- and basked in her knowledge of doing things in a ‘classy' way. And, of course, she looked the part. But she's also a survivor. A tough one who has worked her way to being the lady on the arm of a Las Vegas deity. She knows Vegas. She was born in Bosworth , Missouri , (population,500), and when she was ten her family moved to Wichita , Kansas . It was the days of the Depression. There were hard times.She was shy and gangly:' I always felt like the bones stuck out. I didn't consider myself pretty at all. But I realised that the best thing I could do in life was work as a model.' Her family had moved to Long Beach half an hour down the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles . She worked as a model at department stores and car shows before landing a contract with Eileen Ford's agency in New York . She had married a singer -- and was pregnant. She returned to California and, aged 21, opened the Barbara Blakely School of Modelling and Charm. Four years later she found herself a divorced businesswoman and single mother ( her son Robert is now a New York lawyer). It was 1959 and she decided to move to Las Vegas where she became a showgirl at the Riveria Hotel. Enter from stage left, Zeppo Marx. |
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