delanceyplace.com 12/29 - sinatra and women

12/28/09 to 1/1/10: The Delanceyplace.com
Week of
Love

Today's encore excerpt shows the style of
Frank Sinatra in expressing his love to the women in
his life:

"Another [Sinatra] trademark: He adored openly and
gave not a damn who saw. In the middle of parties,
amid any gathering, he blurted encomiums of love
and appreciation: 'Doesn't she look radiant?' he would
say of Bacall. ('I remember feeling so happy,' she said
of such eruptions.) Whatever his latest elations and
fancies, they were always made grandly audible: 'No
one prettier has ever been in my house!' 'You're
beautiful tonight!' 'You look mah-velous!' (That was, in
fact, exactly how he said it.) Public proclamation did
not faze him; after all, he sang the same sentiments
on records and stages - legendarily making every
woman feel that he sang only to her.

"Thus, in 1965, to his still-secret girlfriend Mia Farrow,
thirty years his junior: He popped his head out of the
Palm Springs swimming pool, adjacent to the golf
course. And there, dripping chlorine, with house
guests agape, he bellowed toward her, 'I love you!'
Recalled one witness, 'If anyone had been on the
Tamarisk seventeenth green that second, they would
have had the scoop of the year.' Before becoming, at
age twenty-one, the third Mrs. Frank Sinatra, Mia
Farrow had shorn her locks, cropped them all but off,
stirring a nationwide hubbub. (She was then an
ingénue on television's Peyton Place, whose
mailbags lumped with outrage de coiffure.) 'But,' she
later wrote, 'there was no drama, no fight with Frank,
he loved my hair the minute he saw it, so I kept it short
for years.' Indeed, he promptly gave her a pale yellow
Thunderbird - 'to match your hair.' 'I'm proud of her,' he
announced to everyone, crowing of her beauty and her
brains and her bangs. ...

"While he was wooing Barbara Marx, his broadcasts
took on epic sweep. He was loud and
unabashed - throughout courtship, then
marriage - before the eyes of Hollywood royalty, heads
of state, or clustered intimates. He toasted her
everywhere, lavishly so. She says, 'I've never known
anything like it. He lifts his glass and says, 'I drink to
you, my love, because I adore you!' He doesn't care
who hears it.' Angie Dickinson, who has beheld these
demonstrations, allows, 'He's great to her that way.
What other man could really get away with that? But, of
course, we know that the king can do things his
subjects cannot.' Citing other such attentions, Barbara
Sinatra continues: 'We can be in the middle of a huge
party and he'll come and whisper the most sexy things
in my ear. When we were dating, he would send a
wire almost every day from wherever he was, and
flowers every day. He would call and say, 'just called to
tell you that I love you,' then hang up. There'd be no
further conversation than that. It would knock me out.
He's just a wonderful romantic.' "

Bill Zehme, The Way You Wear Your Hat,
Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 149-152.