Barbara Sinatra
Former showgirl who almost tamed the ‘hell-raising’ Frank Sinatra when she became his last wife
BARBARA SINATRA, who has died aged 90, was a former model and Las Vegas showgirl who became the fourth and last wife of Frank Sinatra in 1976; she also carved a name for herself as a philanthropist who founded a centre for abused children.
She first caught Sinatra’s eye across a Palm Springs golf course while married to Zeppo Marx, the youngest of the five Marx Brothers. In her memoir Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank Sinatra (2011), Barbara described the singer, divorced from his third wife Mia Farrow, as “a 55-year old living legend who’d grown accustomed to getting his own way”.
But her view of Sinatra softened when he stepped in to rescue a charity function she had organised by allowing her to screen his latest film. As her marriage to Zeppo foundered, Barbara was unable to resist “the extraordinary force of nature” that was Sinatra. “When he pulled me into his arms,” she recalled, “I was caught completely off guard. Such was the power of the Sinatra magnetism that I didn’t really have a choice.”
They married in 1976, when she was 49 and he was 60, at a ceremony in Palm Springs attended by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Gregory and Veronique Peck, Cary Grant, and Kirk and Anne Douglas. What began as a fling turned into a 22-year marriage, during which Barbara followed her husband all over the globe, and was by his side when he died from a heart attack in 1998. “I was his companion, consultant, muse, psychiatrist and lover,” she wrote.
The daughter of a butcher, she was born Barbara Blakeley on March 10 1927, at Bosworth, Missouri. When she was 10 her parents moved to Wichita, Kansas. Shy, tall and gangly, Barbara did not consider herself pretty, but reckoned that her skinny figure might be suitable for modelling.
After leaving school, she moved with her family to Long Beach, California, where she won the Miss Long Beach beauty pageant and began modelling for department stores. By the age of 21 she was married to an aspiring singer called Bob Oliver, and had opened the Barbara Blakeley School of Modeling and Charm. But after she gave birth to a son, her husband lost interest and she subsequently fell in love with another singer, moving with him to Las Vegas, where she became a $150-a-week showgirl at the Riviera Hotel.
There she caught the eye of Zeppo Marx who, at 56, had taken early retirement from showbusiness to devote himself to gambling, women and golf.
In 1958 she accepted an invitation to visit him at his home in Palm Springs, California, and fell in love with the place, though not, by her own admission, with Zeppo, who was 26 years her senior. She married him anyway in 1959 and moved into his estate on the grounds of the Tamarisk Country Club. “That’s when I first started meeting Hollywood-type people,’’ she recalled.
In fact she had first set eyes on Frank Sinatra in Vegas in 1957, but had been unimpressed. The singer had been propping up the bar with some of his “Rat-pack” buddies. “They all seemed to be loaded, so I remember we walked by and I heard someone say, ‘Hey, Blondie! Come over here. Join us!”’ she recalled. “But I just kept walking. One of the girls with me said, ‘Do you know who that was? That was Frank Sinatra.’ And I said, ‘I don’t care, I don’t want to deal with drunks.’ So we left.”
Barbara Sinatra was realistic about how she tamed such a “hell-raiser”, pointing out that by the time they married, Sinatra had been everywhere, done everything and was ready for “wonderful tranquillity”. In fact, though, dealing with her husband’s drinking and temper tantrums seems to have been a constant feature of her life.
Once, during a game of charades, Sinatra’s team lost a round and Sinatra turned to Barbara, who was keeping time with a large brass clock. “He had been drinking quite a lot. It must have been about 4 o’clock in the morning. He picked up the clock and I think he wanted to hit me with it … He threw it against the front door and it broke into a thousand pieces … Then [the comedian] Pat Henry stood up and said, ‘I know what that is – As Time
Goes By’.” Sinatra smiled, and “the moment of danger had passed.”
Even though Sinatra continued to provide generous financial support to his ex-wives (and his three children), Barbara claimed she was never jealous: “When he was with me, he made me feel like I was everything. His love and attention, his time and gifts, his warmth and understanding made me feel very secure.”
He threw himself into helping her raise $2.25 million to build the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center, which provides counselling for victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and opened in 1986 at Rancho Mirage, California. He continued to help her raise funds through direct donations and through the Frank Sinatra Celebrity Invitational Golf Tournament, at which he performed his last ever show in 1995.
Barbara Sinatra preferred not to dwell on the family feud over his estate that saddened and angered Sinatra in his final years. According to his biographer J Randy Taraborrelli, the first rift emerged in 1988 when Barbara persuaded her husband to change his will and leave her his two main homes – his compound near Palm Springs and his mansion in Beverly Hills, which until then were reportedly to be split, with half their value going to Barbara and half to the three children by his first wife – Nancy, Christina and Frank Jr.
A further cause of rancour was a contract Frank Sinatra signed in 1993 with Capitol Records giving Barbara royalties of 20 per cent on sales, and she had also begun to manage reissues of 1940s Sinatra music. The children claimed they had a moral right over pre-1960 songs. In 1996 they warned their own father through a lawyer that his Live in Concert CD broke an agreement not to re-record songs to which they owned the rights.
The family also came to blows over Christina’s use of the Sinatra name to market merchandise. According to The Wall Street Journal, Barbara lost a fierce argument over which likeness of her husband to print on a souvenir tie. The children also scotched Sinatra’s plans to adopt Robert, Barbara’s son by her first husband.
Family enmities resurfaced as Sinatra’s health deteriorated when the children accused Barbara of holding their father “hostage”. In the event, Barbara was left the lions share of his assets, and while he provided for each of his children, he included a “nononsense clause” in his will, which would disinherit instantly anyone who tried to contest the settlement in court.
Barbara Sinatra is survived by her son.
Barbara Sinatra, born March 10 1927, died July 25 2017